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A 

COMMON-SENSE 

HELL 




Being the Practical Thoughts 
of a Business Man About the 
Future Fate of the Wicked, 
Contained in Letters to his Son. 

By 
ARTHUR RICHARD ROSE 


G. W. DILLINGHAM COMPANY 
PUBLISHERS 08 NEW YORK 



LIBRARY of CONGRESS 
Two CoDics Received 

FEB 23 1906 



e1f 



Copyright, 1906, by 
G. W. DILLINGHAM COMPANY 

Entered at Stationers^ Hall 

All rights reserved 

{Issued March, igo6) 

Net 



A Common-Sense Hell 



DEDICATED 
( Without permission) 



To 

THEODORE ROOSEVELT, 

The Man 



Because His Skill and Joy in 

Stripping off the Husky 

While Preserving the Kernel 

Of any thing whose Kernel is Worth Preserving 

And whose Husk Obscures that Worthy 

Have been a Constant Ltspiration 

To the Author 

In the Preparation of 

This Work 



FOREWORD 

The appeal which this book makes, is to 
those who earnestly desire to retain the Bible 
as the basis of their faith, and yet are per- 
turbed and distressed by certain seeming con- 
tradictions in its teachings. 



CONTENTS 



LETTBB 






FAOS 


I. 


Choosing His Life Woek . 


9 


n. 


A W A NiNa Profession 


12 


m. 


Dectjne of Church- Going 


14 


lY. 


The Illogicality of Theologians 
AND THE Dogma of Inspiration , 


17 


V. 


A Challenge to Debate . 


. 28 


VI. 


The Challenge Accepted 




. 30 


vn. 


A Call for Time 




. 34 


vm. 


Is God Just or Unjust ? . 




. 35 


IX. 


More Time Needed . 




. 41 


X. 


Is Suicide Always a Sin I 




. 42 


XT. 


A Period of Perplexity « 




. 47 


XU. 


A Eeassurance . . . , 




. 49 


xin. 


Hope Eestored . . • , 




. 51 


XiV. 


The Body After Death . 




. 52 


XY. 


Christ's Words Eegarding Hell 


. 55 


XVI. 


Fire Cannot Burn a Disembodiei 
Spirit 


. 58 


xvn. 


An Innocuous Hell no Hell at Ali 


:, 61 


XV 111. 


A Common-Sense Hell 


. 63 


XIX. 


Is God Vindictive ? . 


. 96 


XX. 


God Is Not Vindictive 


» 


. 98 



8 



CONTENTS 



XXI. The Justness of God . . . 103 

XXII. A Hard Eiddle to Solve . . 114 

XXIII. God's Justice Proven . . .117 

XXIV. Longevity AND Environment . 137 
XXV. God is Impartial . . . .139 

XXVI. Perplexity Eemoved . . .150 

XXVII. Suicide Always a Mistake . . 151 

XXVIII. More Determined Than Ever to 

Preach 155 

XXIX. The Parental Blessing . . 157 

Enclosure Sent with Letter XV 162 



Letter No. I 

CHOOSING HIS LIFE WOEK 



Princeton University ^ Jan. 15, ^05. 
Princeton, N. J. 
My dear Father : 

As you know, I will soon be graduated 
here and receive the degree of Bachelor of Arts 
from my Alma Mater. It is high time, there- 
fore, that I should decide what my life-work 
is to be, in order that I may lose no time after 
graduation in entering upon it. 

Several times during the Christmas vaca- 
tion I intimated to you that my preference 
would be to become a minister of the gospel. 
Have you any objection to my entering the 
theological seminary here next term and fit- 
ting myself for the high ofiice of a preacher 

of God's word ? 

9 



10 A COMMON-SENSE HELL 

I know you have none on the ground of 
expense, for you have always contemplated 
putting me into a profession or business after 
the completion of my Arts course; but in 
some way I feel, rather than know, that your 
selection for me would not be the Church. 

I have hesitated to bring this question to 
an issue between us, father, because if we 
differ seriously on this subject, it will be the 
first time we ever have differed about any- 
thing important. I shall always desire to pay 
that respect to your wishes which my filial 
gratitude to so splendid a father as you have 
been to me, calls for ; but yet I am a man 
now (though a young one) and I ought to be 
left to make for myself a choice that will have 
consequences of far more importance to me 
than they can possibly be to you. 

Please write me fully your views on this 
subject. 

My heart is set upon the ministry. The 
most earnest wish I have in the world is to 
become a preacher of God's Word. The most 



A COMMON-SENSE HELL 11 

earnest wish I have in the world next to that, 
is not to grieve or disappoint you. How is it 
to be, father ? 

Your loving son, 

Arthur. 



Letter No. II 

A WANING PEOFESSION 



Drexel Building, Wall Street^ 
Nev) York, Jan. 20. 
My dear Son : 

Your letter of Jan. 15 impresses me 

favorably on account of its frankness and 

earnestness. It certainly is time that we 

faced the situation involved in choosing a 

profession for you and it certainly is true that 

after we have argued it out you should finally 

be left to choose for yourself. 

As for your strong preference to become a 
preacher, all I will say now is : Why choose 
a profession whose power and influence are on 
the wane ? 

There was a time when the pulpit was a 
mighty factor in this land, when the preach- 
er's word came pretty near being law in his 

12 



A COMMON-SENSE HELL 13 

little community. That day is past. The 
preaching of the gospel of Christ from the 
pulpits of America to-day has much less in- 
fluence over the average business man than it 
had even a generation ago. The average busi- 
ness man does not go to church in this age. 
Church members nowadays are mostly 
women. 

Do you aspire to be a leader of women, or 
do you aspire to be a leader of men ? 

Answer me that, my son, before we go any 
further. 

Your afiectionate father, 

J. G. R. 



Letter No. Ill 

DECLINE OF CHUECHGOING 



Princeton University^ Jan. 25. 
My dear Father : 

Your somewhat blunt question de- 
manding to know whether I aspire to be a 
leader of men or a leader of women, can only 
be directly answered by my replying that of 
course I aspire to be a leader of men. 

When I first read this question from your 
pen I was strongly inclined to dispute your 
assertion that the preacher of the gospel of 
Christ is not as much a leader of men to-day 
as he ever was. Yet when I called to mind 
all the complaints I had heard from the pulpit 
and from the religious press, that business 
men are staying away from the church more 
and more ; and when I reflected that the 

clergymen who apparently have the most in- 

14 



A COMMON-SENSE HELL 15 

fluence upon the thought of our time are 
those who compose the faculties of our uni- 
versities and colleges or fill editorial chairs, 
or make a specialty of sociological or philan- 
thropic work, or preach politics rather than 
the Bible, I began to realize that the preacher 
of the simple gospel of Christ has lost much 
of that hold which he once had upon the life 
of the people. 

Certainly if the numbers of American busi- 
ness men who do not go to church continue 
to increase in the future in the same propor- 
tion as those numbers have been increasing 
in recent years, no one will be able to deny 
that the profession of preaching the gospel is 
a waning one. 

But on the other hand, father, I cannot be- 
lieve that this apparently growing habit of the 
average American business man to stay away 
from church, is to become a permanent na- 
tional characteristic. I cannot believe that 
the proportion of non-church-goers is to in- 
crease indefinitely. I do believe that the pres- 



16 A COMMON-SENSE HELL 

ent decadence of church attendance is only a 
passing symptom due to temporary and re- 
movable causes. I do believe firmly that the 
preacher of the simple gospel of Christ will 
again be as powerful a factor in his commu- 
nity as he was in the past. Just why I believe 
this I cannot explain ; but I feel sure of it. 

Now what do you, a shrewd business man, 
think is the cause of the present decline of the 
influence of the preacher over the business 
men of America ? Let me have your views 
on this, Father. They may throw some light 
upon my perplexity about the present, or af- 
ford some reason for my optimism about the 
future. 

Your loving son, 

Arthuk- 



Letter No. IV 

THE ILLOGICALITY OF THEOLOGIANS 
AND THE DOGMA OF IKSPIEATION 



Drexel Building, Wall Street^ 
New York, Feb. 1. 
My dear Arthur : 

Whether your optimism with regard to 
the future influence of the preacher in Amer- 
ica is well or ill-founded, I will not attempt 
to decide. It will be no trouble, however, to 
give you my views as to the causes which 
have led to the present decadence of that in- 
fluence from what it was in former years. 

Your query : '' What is the cause ? '' is not 
new. Many before you have asked it, and 
many answers have been given to it. Only 
one of these answers satisfles me. It is that 
the plan of salvation, preached from the pul- 
pit, is too illogical to satisfy the intellect of 

17 



18 A COMMON-SENSE HELL 

the average American business man of to-day 
as it did satisfy the less logical or exacting 
minds of his forefathers. 

Too illogical — that's the point, my son, too 
self-contradictory. 

The average American business man of to- 
day knows much more of the world as it ac- 
tually is, than his forefathers did. Knowledge 
of things that really are so, is vastly more gen- 
eral to-day that it was even two generations 
ago. Nearly every decade of the last sixty 
years has witnessed the abandonment of some 
belief — religious, historic or scientific — that 
was as firmly held by our forefathers as the 
dogma of inspiration is held by many church- 
men to-day. Well-meaning Christian men 
have tortured and killed one another in the 
jtiot remote past for the sake of religious tenets 
that are no longer considered to be of vital im- 
portance. Countless Christian mothers have 
wept bitter tears, believing that their children 
who died in infancy were eternally damned, 
according to a creed now pretty generally ab- 



A COMMON-SENSE HELL 19 

rogated to the museum of metaphysical curios. 
Other dogmas, now firmly believed, will meet 
the same fate in time. We need not enumerate 
them all here. But, just as an example, let 
us consider this doctrine of plenary inspira- 
tion of the New Testament, which would have 
us believe that the gospels are faultless and 
that the gospel writers were supernaturally 
preserved from all error in setting down the 
words of Christ and in expressing His true 
meaning. 

Bid you ever, when seeking for the real 
meaning of Christ's words, as reported by the 
Apostles, attach much significance to the fact 
that these reports were written years after 
Christ had died ? 

Before I went into banking, I was a news- 
paper reporter, as you know, and the paper I 
worked for, laid particular stress upon the ac- 
curacy of its reports. I was not a short-hand 
writer, but I had an excellent memory and 
could with great rapidity make copious notes, 
from which I afterwards wrote out my reports. 



20 A COMMON-SENSE HELL 

My specialty was interviews with prominent 
men, and in order to be accurate, I frequently 
submitted my finished article to the man in- 
terviewed, after I had written the interview 
out in full, but before it was published. Al- 
though oftentimes hardly an hour had elapsed 
between the time I interviewed him and the 
time when I began, with the aid of my excel- 
lent memory and my copious notes, to set 
down his words in full on paper, I many 
times failed, in spite of extreme care, to get 
them down just exactly as they were uttered, 
and I often found, on submitting the proof to 
him for revision, that I had in some sentences 
unintentionally varied not only his language 
but his meaning. 

Now consider carefully the fact that the 
Apostles were not short-hand writers, and let 
me ask you what are the reasonable and com- 
mon-sense chances, that years after Christ 
was dead, they could write out reports of what 
He said throughout His entire ministry, with- 
out making many errors in His exact Ian- 



A COMMON-SENSE HELL 21 

guage and also failing in other cases to convey 
His exact meaning ? 

Do not these considerations afford a com- 
mon-sense business man good reason for re- 
fusing to receive as absolutely accurate and 
beyond the perad venture of mistake, those re- 
ports of Christ's sayings which seem self- 
contradictory or at variance with the real 
facts of life which one sees all about him? 

I say they do. And I predict that this 
doctrine of infallibility of the Gospel writers 
will be among the very next which will be 
discarded by Protestants everywhere. 

Now, the educated, practical, American 
business man, reading, remembering, and re- 
flecting on these things, observes that these 
changes which have occurred in the religious 
belief of Christians appear to have arisen, not 
through any new revelation, but by the 
simple though slow process of applying more 
or less common-sense to the interpretation of 
the true meaning of the Scriptures. He is 
aware that there are other tenets of his church 



22 A COMMON-SENSE HELL 

to which this touchstone of common-sense 
does not yet seem to have been applied. He 
says to himself: 

'' What is the use of my taking this or that 
part of a creed too seriously? In another 
generation it may be so modified as to be 
practically eliminated." 

Especially is he inclined to apply this line 
of reasoning to any tenet of faith which seems 
to him to be markedly illogical and contra- 
dictory of the simple teachings of Christ. 

'^ The more illogical it is/' he says to him- 
self, *' the sooner will it be banished to the 
limbo of outworn superstitions and therefore 
the less is it worth worrying myself about." 

Now, some of the most illogical of all the 
tenets of the Christian faith are enunciated 
constantly from the pulpit to-day and the 
practical, American business man is called 
upon to believe them by the exercise of faith. 
If he has not faith enough to accept these 
illogical tenets as the very truth, he is abjured 
to pray for more faith and to keep on praying 



A COMMON-SENSE HELL 23 

for more and more faith until he gets enough 
faith to enable him to accept as true these 
dogmas which his reason, unaided by faith, 
rejects. 

But the practical American business man 
has learned by experience, observation and 
reading that almost any one may persuade 
himself to believe anything, if he only desires 
hard enough to bring that state of mind about. 
In religion as well as in politics he has seen 
men under the stimulus of a revival, or an 
especially magnetic exhorter or a trained 
pleader, or in a free silver campaign, let us 
say, mentally lash themselves into thoroughly 
believing theories which they did not at all 
understand and were wholly unable to argue 
intelligently about — theories which, in spite 
of their firm faith, the developments of a few 
years proved to them conclusively to be 
utterly false. 

Therefore the practical American business 
man is coming more and more to think : '' If 
such and such a theory does not commend 



24 A COMMON SENSE HELL 

itself to my cool judgment as agreeing with 
the teachings of Christ Himself, there is little 
to be gained by seeking faith in order to be- 
lieve it — for believing a thing by fiiith only, 
cannot make that thing really so, and it is a 
sound business principle that to labor at any- 
thing under a misapprehension as to the in- 
side facts, is seldom profitable and often posi- 
tively injurious/' 

Now I, myself, Arthur, fairly represent the 
average, practical, American business man 
and I know exactly what cooled my desire to 
attend Church (for I was a faithful attendant 
when I was your age) and what at last 
quenched that desire altogether. And I have 
taken the trouble to ascertain by personal 
inquiry from hundreds of other American 
business men what is the cause of their dis- 
taste for hearing the '' preached word '' as it 
is sometimes called, and I have come to the 
conclusion that it is this (I use an epitome of 
the experience of all of them) : ^' It irritates 
me to hear a preacher insist that I should 



A COMMON-SENSE HELL 25 

regulate my life according to doctrines or 
creeds which I do not believe to be founded 
logically, reasonably and convincingly upon 
the teachings of Christ and which he is un- 
able to demonstrate to me to be founded logic- 
ally, reasonably and convincingly upon the 
teachings of Christ. From my pew I cannot 
answer him and refute the illogical arguments 
he advances while endeavoring to uphold his 
creed and therefore, after enduring this weekly 
irritation as long as I could, I have given up 
listening to sermons and now I go to church 
only under pressure and as seldom as possible. 
It is useless to abjure me to believe this or that 
tenet if it is so illogical as to insult my reason- 
ing powers; because no reading, thinking, com- 
mon-sense man in these days can fail to be 
aware that the most learned and the most 
sanctified members of the Christian clergy 
still differ widely and radically among them- 
selves as to the proper interpretation and the 
true meaning of many highly important pas- 
sages of the Scriptures and even the most 



26 A COMMON-SENSE HELL 

generally accepted of the Christian doctrines 
are constantly being assailed from the pulpit 
by the newer and more learned generation of 
clergymen. By the time this new generation 
of clergymen has become old, there will be 
still newer clergymen to assail the doctrines 
which the new clergymen of to-day consider 
unassailable. This has been so in the past 
and history repeats herself. I have not time, 
crowded as I am with the affairs of my hus- 
tling business life, to make a personal study 
of the original sources from which our Bible 
is derived ; therefore I will let those who have 
the time to do it, continue to argue among 
themselves about its real meaning until they 
have arrived at some unanimous conclusion. 
In the meantime, I will believe just so much 
of their dogma as is approved by what com- 
mon-sense my Creator has given me and I 
will not allow my soul to be harrowed up too 
much by such of their tenets as seem to me to 
be wholly illogical and entirely unreasonable." 
This, I say, my dear Arthur, is a fait^iful 



A COMMON-SENSE HELL 27 

description of the feeling which cooled my 
desire to listen to the average sermon and 
this, I say, describes the feeling of very many 
other practical business men who do not at- 
tend church except on rare occasions. 

Hoping my long letter has not wearied you 
and that it may throw some light on your 
perplexity, I remain, 

Your affectionate father, 

J. G. R. 



Letter No. V 

A CHALLENGE TO DEBATE 



Princeton University^ Feb. 5. 
My dear Father : 

Far from wearying me, your long let- 
ter of Feb. 1 interested me keenly, from start 
to finish. I had no idea that you had given 
so much thought to theology, because ever 
since I grew old enough to notice, you have 
not been a church-going man and to me have 
always seemed absorbed in business. 

That is why I never talked with you about 
theology ; but now that I know why you 
showed no interest in church services — now 
since I realize that your neglect of them was 
not due to indifference towards religion, an- 
other bond of sympathy is formed between us, 
inasmuch as I know you to be at least inter- 
ested in the topic which is of all others the 

most absorbing to me. 

28 



A COMMON-SENSE HELL ^9 

How many good arguments with you I have 
missed by not understanding your attitude to- 
wards the Church ! I dearly love debate, and I 
know you to be a foeman more than worthy of 
my almost untried steel. Let us begin now, 
Father, and not stop until we have threshed 
this thing out thoroughly. 

I will be the unworthy champion of the 
pulpit of to-day ; you will represent that large 
part of our business community in America 
which holds aloof from preachers. You have 
stated your belief that this aloofness is due to 
the illogicality of many of the Church's 
dogmas. Now I call on you to enumerate 
them — those of the Church's dogmas which 
have proven offensive to your ideas of reason- 
ableness, in order that I may uphold them. 

I hereby throw down the gage of battle, sir. 
I pray you take it up and let us cross swords 
and be at it without delay. 

Your loving son, 

Akthur, 



Letter No. VI 

THE CHALLENGE ACCEPTED 



Drexel Building ^ Wall Street^ 
New York, Feb. 10. 
My dear Arthur : 

I am amused by the cheery way in which 
you challenge your world-worn old father to 
theological combat. It fits well with your 
youth and general optimism. But it is no 
light task for me to undertake. I have turned 
these thoughts over in my mind, off and on, 
for many years, but never before attempted to 
set them down in black and white. Never- 
theless I will accept your challenge. If I do 
not make myself clear in some cases, you must 
attribute it to that ineptitude for facile ex- 
pression which long years of close attention to 
one line of business engenders. Now, to 

begin : 

30 



A COMMON-SENSE HELL 31 

I have found by personal inquiry extending 
over many years that the Christian doctrine 
which is most repellent to business men of 
common-sense — the doctrine which seems to 
them the most illogical — and the doctrine 
which is to blame more than any other for 
irritating large numbers of practical men to 
the point where they give up listening to ser- 
mons, is the doctrine of Hell Fire. 

That a God who is said to be absolutely 
just, that a God who is said to be all-power- 
ful, that a God who is said to be Love — should 
also be represented as having ordained that 
sinners be cast into a lake of fire, a place of 
eternal torment '' where their worm dieth not 
and their fire is not quenched ^' seems to these 
practical business men to be highly illogical, 
utterly unreasonable and in addition, insult- 
ing to the Deity. 

No creator who would deal out to his crea- 
ture an infinity of torture as punishment for 
sins committed by that creature during a span 
of generally less than a hundred years, could, 



32 A COMMON-SENSE HELL 

as far as these practical men can see, be either 
just or loving. This dogma of eternal hell 
fire is an almost insurmountable stumbling- 
block in the way of the common-sense, 
American business man, who desires to be- 
lieve in the plan of salvation unfolded in the 
New Testament. 

Many attempts have been made to remove 
this stumbling-block by explaining hell away 
altogether, as being merely metaphorical, but 
the practical business man feels in his bones 
that if hell can be entirely explained away as 
being metaphorical, then heaven could also 
be explained away as metaphorical, should 
theologians have any object in doing so. 

Even those who have the temerity to at- 
tempt to explain away hell can give no 
logical reason for their argument. Their effort 
seems to proceed mostly from that abhorrence 
for inflicting pain on man or beast which is a 
distinct feature of American life to-day, not 
yet shared by the less refined peoples. 

None of these preachers I have ever met or 



A COMMON-SENSE HELL 33 

heard about, no matter how loath he is to 
preach hell fire to his congregation, or how 
adroitly he tries to minimize this hideous doc- 
trine, will give you a sane and logical reason 
to show why it is an absurdity. Both kinds 
of preacher — ^those who uphold the old-fash- 
ioned view of hell and also those who seek 
to substitute some less abhorrent idea of hell 
— leave their disciples floundering in oceans 
of unreasonableness and illogicality. They 
offer no logical, reasonable substitute for a hell 
of eternal fire. 

Now let me hear what you can say logically 
to uphold the Church's contradictory attitude 
to-day towards the dogma of eternal hell fire 
for the sinner. 

Your aflTectionate father, 

J. G. R. 



Letter No. VII 

A CALL FOR TIME 

Princeton University y Feb. 11. 
My dear Father : 

I hasten to answer your letter of yes- 
terday ; not because I have no need for time 
to meet your argument as to the Church's 
attitude towards the doctrine of hell fire ; but 
because I need so much time to answer it, 
that I must beg of you to proceed with your 
next argument before you receive my reply to 
your first. 

I did not expect you to open on me with so 
heavy a gun. 

Please state another of the Church's dogmas 
which you find to be offensively illogical and 
in the meantime I will be preparing my argu- 
ment on hell fire. 

Your loving son, 

Arthur. 
34 



Letter No. VIII 

IS GOD JUST OE UNJUST! 



Drexel Building y Wall Streety 
New York, Feb. 12. 
My dear Arthur : 

The church announces, without a sus- 
picion of hesitancy in its tone, that God is 
absolutely and invariably just in His dealings 
with each and every one of His creatures and 
yet the church advances, to uphold that propo- 
sition, no argument which does not fail to 
convince a common-sense business man in the 
light of actual happenings which we see around 
us every day. 

We see the wicked prospering and oppress- 
ing the poor. We see pious folk steeped in 
poverty and enduring great injustice, cruelty 
and wrong at the hands of the wicked. When 
we ask : ^^ Can He be a just God who permits 

these things?'' your church replies: ''The 

35 



36 A COMMON-SENSE HELL 

wicked man who prospers on this earth will 
be punished hereafter, while the good man 
who suffers on earth will be rewarded in 
heaven/' 

But no logical reason is advanced to show 
how the wicked man who prospers on earth 
will be punished any more severely than the 
wicked man who does not prosper on earth ; 
or how the good man who suffers on earth will 
be rewarded in heaven in any higher degree 
than the good man who prospers on earth. 

We often see a truly good man who is 
wealthy. He has the money-making faculty, 
a clear brain, good health, and abundant vi- 
tality. He enjoys for many years all of those 
innocent pleasures that wealth can bring : 
good education, good music, good pictures, 
good food, numerous friends. He has the hap- 
piness of being able to confer many and great 
benefits on those he loves. He can give his 
children substantial advantages in the race of 
life. He can get for his beloved wife the best 
of medical skill and care, accompanied by 



A COMMON-SENSE HELL 37 

change of scene and air, whenever she needs 
it. He can give lavishly of his wealth to 
philanthropic causes. He may live in a coun- 
try where law is respected and property rights 
are protected and he dies happy in the knowl- 
edge that he has earned and won the esteem 
and respect of his fellow men. 

Just as often we see a truly good man who 
all his life is pinched by poverty. The Creator 
did not endow him with a clear brain, but 
with a dull one. His health is feeble, not 
rugged. His vitality is low. He cannot 
make money nor keep it. He got only a 
makeshift education and can give his children 
no better. His loved wife must bear the heavy 
burden of motherhood without the best of 
medical care. No change of air or scene can 
he give her ; perhaps not even proper food or 
clothing. She must work hard in the field or 
factory or over the cook-stove or washtub and 
he must watch her sufferings unrelieved by 
any luxuries. He can give only sparingly to 
charity. He may live in a land where law is 



38 A COMMON-SENSE HELL 

for the rich only and the poor are oppressed 
and robbed. If he lives under Turkish rule, 
for instance, he may even have to endure see- 
ing his daughters violated by brutal soldiery, 
his sons maimed for daring to defend them 
and his crops or goods seized for unjust taxes, 
levied at the whim of a rapacious tax-gatherer. 
In fact he spends all his days in a state of ter- 
ror, poverty and helpless indignation and dies 
with the firm conviction that the esteem and 
respect of his neighbors have been withheld 
from him. Yet his life has been a blameless 
one. 

If these two men both get the same reward 
hereafter, can it be said that God has dealt 
justly between them ? 

Again we often see a wicked man who 
prospers exceedingly in his wickedness. All 
his life long he fairly wallows in the sinful 
pleasures which wealth can bring. He com- 
mits numerous moral crimes, but can hire the 
cleverest lawyers to find in the statutes loop- 
holes of escape for him. He may be elected 



A COMMON-SENSE HELL 39 

to the state or the national legislature and help 
make the laws of the land. Honors are his 
and substantial rewards. After years of 
envied existence he too dies, lamented and 
respected by his fellows. 

In strong contrast with this man is the petty 
criminal who has not brains enough to keep 
out of jail. He spends years and years behind 
prison bars in gloom and bitterness. His life 
is made miserable by harsh jailers and bully- 
ing wardens and when his term of imprison- 
ment is up, he often finds he cannot make a 
living in the outer world without resorting to 
crime again. Imprisonment follows imprison- 
ment until at last the miserable wretch dies 
with the humiliating consciousness that his 
fellow citizens will thank heaven they are 
well rid of him. 

Now when these two sinners get to the same 
hell and suffer the same punishment for their 
sins, how can it be said that God has dealt 
justly between them ? 

Yet your church leaves us to infer that both 



40 A COMMON-SENSE HELL 

kinds of good men will go to the same reward 
and that both kinds of bad men will go to the 
same punishment ; and the injustice, the 
partiality, the unevenness (when the career 
here and hereafter of each man is considered 
as one existence) remain. 

A demonstration which ends in an absurdity 
like this is evidently false in its premises and 
is wholly unsatisfactory to a man of common 
sense. 

How do you, my son, uphold the Church's 
doctrine that God acts with absolute and in- 
variable justness towards each of His creatures ? 
Your affectionate father, 

J. G» R. 



Letter No. IX 

MOEE TIME NEEDED 

Princeton University ^ Feb. 15. 
My dear Father : 

Before I had been able to prepare for 

your first question an answer which satisfied 

my own idea of reasonableness, your second 

fell upon me. You enjoy the advantage of 

having your arguments all arranged through 

years of reflection, while I have never had 

such thoughts presented to my mind at all as 

you have raised. 

But I feel sure there must be answers to both 

of them. Give me time, father, and I will 

find them. 

Your loving son, 

Aethur. 



41 



Letter No. X 

IS SUICIDE ALWAYS A SIN! 



Drexel Building^ Wall Street^ 

New York, Feb. 20. 
My dear Arthur : 

Do not think for a moment that I hold 
you to be any the less an able antagonist in this 
debate because you need time in which to 
answer my arguments. On the contrary, I am 
glad to see that you will not stoop to make any 
reply which you are not convinced in your 
own heart meets the issues raised by me. I 
have only contempt for a man who in an argu- 
ment with a friend makes statements which he 
does not himself believe to be true ; but of 
which he hopes his friend will not see the 
falsity. I felt sure you would be perfectly sin- 
cere with me or else I would not have opened 
my mind to you as I have in these letters. 

While you are considering, I will present 

42 



A COMMON-SENSE HELL 43 

my third argument ; but this will be the last 
one I shall advance until you have answered 
all I have previously said. 

A third stumbling block which troubles 
many, though not nearly so many as the 
Christian church's attitude towards hell fire 
and its lack of logical proof of the absolute 
justice of God, is the Church's slack, unstable 
and illogical attitude towards suicide. 

We are told from the pulpit that suicide is 
wrong for various reasons. One of the chief 
of these reasons is that : '^ We should not 
presume to rush unsummoned into the pres- 
ence of our Maker.'' This is illogical be- 
cause whenever we feel that we are about to 
die a natural death, we have no scruples 
about postponing that death just as long as 
we can by every scientific device known to 
the medical practitioner. Finally, when we 
can do no more, when all human skill fails to 
check the progress of the disease which has 
attacked us, we die and the minister says we 
'* have been called hence.'' 



44 A COMMON-SENSE HELL 

Why is it any more disrespectful to our 
Maker to delay when called, than to rush in 
without being called ? And why, if a mortal 
attack of physical disease is to be regarded as 
a '' call," may we not consider a lapse into 
that mental state which causes a distaste for 
life, to be a '' call '' also ? 

Again we are told that suicide is cowardly 
— that the suicide takes his life for the ignoble 
reason that he fears to face the hardships of 
this world ; and by escaping them through 
suicide, he ignominiously leaves those depend- 
ent upon him to suffer ills which he should 
have remained alive to avert. 

But these arguments do not apply to a man 
who is homeless, friendless, childless, with no 
person in any way dependent upon him ; nor 
perhaps to a sick man who is past earning 
any more, but has a small estate to divide 
among his dependent ones, a pittance which 
would only be depleted by his long illness. 
Moreover, more people are afraid of death 
than of anything else, as is shown by the des- 



A COMMON-SENSE HELL 45 

peration with which they seek to ward it off; 
while the suicide faces death bravely. The 
fact is he leaves life generally because he dis- 
likes it — not because he fears its burdens. 

Thus you see the Church has no logical 
reasons to show why suicide is always and in 
every instance wrong. It may argue that 
suicide is manslaughter, and that manslaugh- 
ter is always wrong. And yet manslaughter 
(I use the word not in its technical, legal, 
narrow sense) is committed by the soldier 
who shoots the invading foeman and the 
Church has no blame for the soldier. 

The frontier settler who, surrounded by 
bloody, cruel, and relentless savages, fights to 
the last cartridge, and when he sees that noth- 
ing can save his wife and daughters from cap- 
ture to be followed by a fate worse than death, 
slays them with his own hand and then falls 
with his face to the foe, is exculpated by the 
church for killing his wife and daughters 
under those circumstances, although Christ 
said in His sermon on the mount • ^^ Resist 



46 A COMMON-SENSE HELL 

not evil. Whoever shall smite thee on the 
right cheek, turn to him the other also." 

Therefore, if this taking of the lives of his 
wife and daughters by the settler under some 
circumstances is excusable, certain circum- 
stances ought logically and consistently to 
excuse a person for taking his own life. 

The fact of the matter is that the Church 
excuses in one place the man who takes 
human life, and accuses him in another. The 
Bible says bluntly : ^^ Thou shalt not kill." 

This conflict, this vacillation, this lack of 
logical authority in the tone of the Church 
towards the taking of human life, towards 
^^ ushering souls unsummoned into the pres- 
ence of their Maker," is another feature which 
undermines her influence with the common 
gense, American business man. 

Let me hear from you, my son, how you 
defend the church's attitude on this point. 
Your affectionate father, 

J. G. R. 



Letter No. XI 

A PEEIOD OP PEEPLEXITT 



PriTiceton University, March 20. 
My dear Father : 

I have been brooding over your letters 

for a whole month, since the receipt of your 

last, and the more I think over the issues you 

have raised, the more downcast I have become. 

Father, I cannot refute your arguments by 

any logical, reasonable line of thought. The 

charges of illogicality, unreasonableness and 

of wavering which you have brought against 

the church in your letters, are true. I cannot 

deny it ; but then what am I to do ? What 

am I to think ? My whole belief in revealed 

religion is shaken by your words. Am I then 

to become an atheist through the influence of 

my father ? Is there no way of accepting the 

doctrine of punishment for the wicked after 

47 



48 A COMMON-SENSE HELL 

death and the dogma that God is just, except 
by the exercise of faith — that attribute so 
much more characteristic of women and of 
children than of men ? Are there no logical 
reasons to support these doctrines ? 

Father, where shall I turn ? Do you really 
counsel me to abandon my belief in the 
Bible ? — to become a rejector of the word of 
God ? — to assume the attitude of the infidel ? 
I can hardly believe that you do ; but what 
am I to think from your letters ? Is there no 
answer to them? 

Your perplexed but loving son, 

Arthur. 



Letter No. XII 

A EEASSUEANCE 



Drexel Building^ Wall Street, 

New York, March 21. 
My dear Arthur : 

I hasten to reply to your honest letter 

of yesterday. And let me assure you at the 

very start that I do not want you to become an 

atheist — that I do not want to shake your 

faith in God's word and that there are logical, 

reasonable answers to all of my arguments. 

These answers, however, you will not hear 
from the pulpit. The clergy do not use them 
— more's the pity — and that is the real reason 
why the profession of preaching the gospel is 
waning in influence and power to-day. 

Logical answers to these questions I have 

raised with you have been demanded by the 

common-sense men of the laity for years, but 

49 



50 A COMMON-SENSE HELL 

instead, the clergy have fed them with il- 
logicalities that have insulted the reason by 
seeking to relegate that clear-seeing attribute 
of man to the rear and to set up in its stead 
the vague and variable attribute of faith. 

There exists, my son, an argument which 
logically and reasonably proves the doctrine 
of hell fire to be an utter absurdity. 

There exists an argument which logically 
and reasonably proves God to be always ab- 
solutely just towards every one of His creatures. 

There exists an argument which logically 
and reasonably proves suicide to be always and 
under all circumstances wrong. 

I have not time to-day to set out these three 
arguments succinctly. I can only promise 
you that I will do so very soon. I will devote 
one letter to each. I just write you this hur- 
riedly in order to set your mind at rest as to 
what I am trying to accomplish in this debate 
of ours. 

Your affectionate father, 



Letter No. XIII 

HOPE EESTOEED 



Princeton University ^ March 22. 
My dear Father : 

I can hardly explain to you the joy 

which your letter of yesterday brought to me. 

The relief from the tremendous strain I have 

been under ever since I read the first argument 

you advanced in our debate, is indescribable. 

I only hope that you can allay the doubts 

which have racked my brain since the first 

of last month, as thoroughly as you aroused 

them. Let me hear from you, sir, I beg, as 

soon as you can find time to write. 

Your expectant and loving son, 

Arthur, 



51 



Letter No. XIV 

THE BODY AFTEE DEATH 



Drexel Building ^ Wall Street^ 
New York, March 25. 
My dear Arthur : 

Before I begin to set out at length the 
three arguments which I outlined in my letter 
of March 21 — I must ask you to consider with 
me a preliminary question, which is : '^ What 
authority do you find in the words of Christ 
for believing that after the wicked man dies, 
he will possess a body of any kind in that 
state of existence upon which he then enters? '' 
We have scriptural assurance that when the 
righteous pass into the next world they re- 
ceive '* glorified bodies/' This is just as log- 
ical, just as reasonable, just as easy to believe, 
as it is to believe that God gave us the bodies 

we now inhabit, which indeed are glorified 

62 



A COMMON-SENSE HELL 53 

bodies compared to those which He has given 
to His other creatures on this sphere — the 
beasts, birds and fishes. It requires no viola- 
tion of logical reasoning, no great stretch of 
the imagination, to picture an ethereal entity 
for my soul which would be far superior to 
the kind of body I here inhabit. 

But Christ has not told us what kind of 
body (if any) will be given to the wicked after 
death. Knowing as we do from experience 
that our earthly bodies decay after we are 
dead, and are dissolved into their original 
elements, it would only be reasonable and 
logical for us to suppose (if not told otherwise) 
that the souls of all men (both good and bad) 
after death will not inhabit bodies. 

But since we are told in the Scriptures that 
the good will have glorified bodies, it involves 
no breach of reasonableness to believe that 
statement. However, since we are not ex- 
plicitly told by Christ that the wi-cked will 
have new bodies after they leave these earthly 
bodies, I hold that there are grounds on 



54 A COMMON SENSE HELL 

which it is more reasonable, more logical and 
more advantageous for us to believe that the 
wicked receive no bodies at all in their future 
existence, than it is for us to believe that they 
do inhabit bodies in the other world. 

Now I want you to study this proposition 
from all sides and consult all the authorities 
on the subject and then tell me if you can 
find anywhere any authoritative, explicit 
statement made by Christ that the wicked are 
to have bodies of any kind after death. 

Let me know the result of your research 
along this line before I write to you again. 

Your affectionate father, 

J« G. R. 



Letter No. XV 

CHEIST'S WOEDS EEGAEDING HELL 



Princeton University^ March 30. 
My dear Father : 

I have spent the greater part of the last 
four days consulting the authorities on the 
subject of whether we have or have not any 
^positive and unequivocal assurance from the 
lips of Christ that the wicked shall have bodies 
of any kind after death, and I find that we 
have no such assurance. 

Upon this point Christ has everywhere used 
language which His most reverent follower 
may decline to interpret literally (if he 
chooses) without in the least degree tainting 
his own orthodoxy — language which the most 
vehement supporter of the essential infalli- 
bility of the Bible would be completely justi- 

55 



56 A COMMON-SENSE HELL 

fied in regarding as figurative, should any 
new light be thereby thrown upon a seem- 
ingly illogical dogma or any new explanation 
of a holy mystery be thereby adduced. 

But the utterances of Christ which refer to 
the future fate of the wicked, are so numerous 
that for convenience' sake I have written them 
down in a separate document,^ which I en- 
close herewith. In this document I discuss 
these sayings of Christ in the order in which 
we find them in the revised edition of the 
New Testament, but wherever the same re- 
mark of our Lord is reported more than once 
in the gospels, I have not repeated it. In the 
same document I have set out the course of 
reasoning which has convinced me that wher- 
ever Jesus speaks of the body of the sinner be- 
ing in hell, the language is clearly figurative. 

But I do not understand, father, why you 
should have injected this extraneous subject 
into our debate. What has such a question 
to do with those three comforting reasons that 

^ This separate document will be found at page No, 162, 



A COMMON-SENSE HELL 57 

you promised to give me and which were to 
restore my shaken belief in the Bible ? Please 
do not delay longer in presenting them. 

Your loving son, 

Arthuk. 



Letter No. XVI 

PIEE CANNOT BUEN A DISEMBODIED SPIEIT 



Drexel Building ^ Wall Street^ 
New Yorhy April 5. 
My dear Arthur : 

Notwithstanding your characterization 
of my remarks about the sinner getting no 
body after death, as '^ extraneous " to my ar- 
gument, I must tell you right here and now 
that they are absolutely vital to my argument. 
Each and all of those three, and as you call 
them '' comforting '^ reasons, which you await 
so eagerly, are totally founded upon the 
premises that the sinner gets no body after 
death. Unless you admit that proposition to 
be a fact, these arguments I am about to pre- 
sent can have no weight at all with any logical 
mind. But once that proposition is admitted 
as a fact, the arguments follow naturally and 

reasonably. 

58 



A COMMON-SENSE HELL 59 

It might be retorted by a captious debater 
that I am calling on you to admit something 
as a fact which we have not absolutely proved 
to be a fact. My reply to this is that much 
more light is thrown upon God's plan of sal- 
vation for us, by adopting the dogma that the 
sinner gets no body after death than by ac- 
cepting the doctrine that he gets one. Now, 
either he gets one or he does not get one. 
Therefore by adopting the more reasonable of 
these two conclusions, and the one which 
throws most light upon God's plan of salva- 
tion, we are doing the best that finite men can 
do when considering the infinite. 

Assuming therefore that you accept the 
theory that the wicked man gets no body after 
death, I will proceed to show you, in the first 
place — that the doctrine of eternal hell fire 
for the sinner as the result of sins committed 
on this earth, can be dismissed as a palpable 
absurdity and a libel upon God. 

Let us take the case of an ordinary sinner, 
who not having used to advantage the talents 



60 A COMMON SENSE HELL 

contained in his earthly body, has '^ even that 
talent which he hath " taken away from him. 
What happens to him as he is ushered into 
his new phase of existence ? 

Why, this : 

Having left his ears and auditory nerves 
behind him, he can no longer hear. 

Having left his eyes and optic nerves be- 
hind him, he can no longer see. 

Having left his tongue, palate, and mucous 
membrane behind him, he can no longer taste. 

Having left his speaking apparatus behind 
him, he can no longer speah nor breathe. 

Having left his skin and nerves behind 
him, he can no longer feel. 

Therefore fire could inflict absolutely no pam 
on such a being. Fire does not exist for him. 
Hence to suppose that such a being could 
or would be punished by fire is an absurdity. 

Can you attack that line of reasoning on any 
ground of illogicality, Arthur? Let me see 
if you can. Your affectionate father, 

J. G. R. 



Letter No. XVII 

AN INNOCUOUS HELL NO HELL AT ALL 



Princeton University j April 10. 
My dear Father : 

Having once gained from me an accept- 
ance of your theory that the soul of the sinner 
gets no body after death — you certainly do 
build upon it an argument against hell fire 
which I cannot pick a flaw in because of any 
illogicality ; but all the same it seems to land 
you in the position of demonstrating that hell 
is no punishment at all — does it not ? 

Do you want me to think that the fate of 
the wicked after death is mere extinction? 
What could a soul do that could not hear, see, 
speak, breathe, feel or touch ? Do you want 
to make a mock of God's many threats to 
punish the wicked hereafter according to their 

deserts? What then becomes of the eternal 

61 



62 A COMMONSENSE HELL 

justness of God which you promised to prove 
to me? 

If you take the old-fashioned hell away and 
leave only an innocuous hell in its place, you 
eliminate a large part of the reasons which the 
church has always urged for the sinner to 
abandon his sins and lead a righteous life. 

You are mystifying me, Father. Please ex- 
plain more fully. 

Your loving son, 

Arthur. 



Letter No. XVIII 

A COMMON-SENSE HELL 



Drexel Building , Wall Street^ 

New York, April 15. 
My dear Arthur : 

I do not for one moment believe, nor do 
I want you to believe, that there exists no hell 
where sinful souls will be duly punished after 
death for the sins committed in the body. 
Such a hell exists, of necessity, as I will prove 
to you. But it is not a hell of fire, nor is it a 
necessarily eternal punishment for any one 
soul. 

I believe hell itself is eternal because sin- 
ners will always be dying and going to that 
place or into that stage of existence and some 
will probably always continue to sin there. 
In that logical and reasonable sense hell exists 
eternally, but in that sense alone. Whether 

hell is a place or a state of existence makes no 

63 



64 A COMMON-SENSE HELL 

difference to our argument and we need not 
consider that here. 

Now you seem to think that because I be- 
lieve the sinner after death (having no body) 
can neither feel, taste, see, breathe, speak nor 
hear, he must therefore become practically 
extinct. Not at all. He can still think, 
remember, reason, reflect, aspire, hope, despair, 
and in fact exercise all the purely mental 
emotions, can he not ? 

If you retort that having left his brain be- 
hind, when his earthly body died, he therefore 
cannot think, I answer that our idiot and 
lunatic asylums are filled with men and 
women who have brains but are without 
mental faculties — some lacking this mental 
faculty and some lacking that — some lacking 
more mental faculties than others but all lack- 
ing some — though all having brains. 

Therefore if a man can lack mental faculties 
and still have brains, it is not unreasonable or 
illogical to suppose that he can possess mental 
faculties and still have no brains. 



A COMMON-SENSE HELL 65 

Imagine, therefore, the soul of a wicked 
man at the moment it leaves his body and 
begins mentally to take account of its new 
surroundings. 

'^ Where am I ? " is its first thought. 

All seems black and silent — a void. The 
soul sees nothing, hears nothing, touches 
nothing. 

Presently it becomes aware that some one is 
addressing it. No words are spoken or heard, 
but the newly arrived soul is conscious of a 
companion. 

^^ Where am I ? " asks the newcomer. 

^^ You are in hell,'' is the reply. 

And then the exchange of thought can 
logically and reasonably be imagined to take 
place about as follows between the newly 
arrived soul and the soul that has been long 
in hell (for convenience sake, we will call them 
respectively A and B) : 

A (the newcomer). ''Where are you? I 
cannot see you.'' 

Bo '' How can one see without eyes ? " 



66 A COMMON-SENSE HELL 

A. ^' Am I blind ? Have my eyes failed 
me?'^ 

B. " You have no eyes." 

A. "No eyes? Why not?'' 

B. " Because you have no body/' 

A. " How do I hear you then? " 

B. ** Is my voice harsh or soft, male or fe- 
male, low or loud ? " 

A. " Now that I consider it, I do not hear 
any voice. But I know you are speaking." 

B. " You do not hear because you have no 
ears, I do not speak to you because I have 
no throat, nor tongue, nor lungs, with which 
to produce sound. My spirit it is, and my 
spirit only, which is communing with yours." 

A. "You say I am in hell?" 

B. " Yes." 

A. "I expected as much. But how can I 
suffer the tortures of hell fire without any 
body to be burned ? " 

B. " How indeed ? The tortures here are 
mental." 

A. ** The Bible said they were physicaL" 



A COMMON-SENSE HELL 67 

B. ^^ Some persons thought it did, and so 
they taught many who did not think for 
themselves. Other persons thought it did not.'' 

A. '^ It was often difficult to understand 
just what the Bible did mean, in that old 
life." 

B. ^^ It is just as difficult here." 

A. " Don't you know any more of the 
destiny of man than you did before you came 
here ? " 

B. ^' Something, but not much. We know 
that the good when they died, received won- 
derfully endowed ethereal entities which for 
lack of a better word we may call ^ glorified 
bodies.' That because they made good use of 
their weak, earthly bodies, they now possess 
all of their old senses and powers which can 
bring them any sort of physical or mental 
benefit and also additional powers, senses, 
abilities and faculties that we know nothing 
of, but can dimly imagine. We know that 
when they received these glorified entities or 
spiritualized bodies, their souls began that new 



68 A COMMON-SENSE HELL 

life just in the state of moral advancement in 
which they were when they left the earth. 

^^ But the mystery of life is now made clear 
to them and with their new powers they 
steadily advance in all things that are good 
and delightful ; while we, who misused our 
earthly bodies, are plunged into ' outer dark- 
ness.' We know not even where we are in 
relation to the other parts of the universe. 
There is no sun, nor moon, nor stars, nor 
locality for us. We know not whether hell is 
a place or a mere stage of our existence. For 
us it has no metes nor bounds. For us it is as 
wide as the universe itself We simply know 
that we exist in company with one another 
and we can communicate our thoughts to one 
another, but as to our future, we know no 
more for certain, than we did when we were 
on earth.'' 

A. '^ The terrors and sorrows of this state 
— this hell, as you call it — do not then seem 
to be very great. What are they ? " 

B. '' The sorrows of hell are manifold. 



A COMMON-SENSE HELL 69 

True, we are not condemned here to writhe 
forever in the exquisite torture of unquencha- 
ble flame, nor is the prospect of improving our 
lot absolutely hopeless, but after I have told 
you of the mental suflerings we endure, you 
will, I am sure, consider our case sufficiently 
sad to make any one strive to escape it. 

'^ When you were on earth you doubtless 
have witnessed the prostration of spirit which 
seizes a man when he loses reputation, honor 
and fortune at such an age that he cannot 
start anew. Such melancholy the convict sen- 
tenced to imprisonment for life feels ; such 
melancholy we feel here. This great mel- 
ancholy sinks us. It breeds in us such list- 
lessness and dejection that it seems to prevent 
the soul from making almost any effort at all 
which requires courage or persistence — any 
effort to elevate itself, to improve itself, to 
aim at or even hope for salvation. Think of 
what we suffer here from envy alone — that 
canker of the heart — as we contemplate the 
great contrast between our fate and the happy 



70 A COMMON-SENSE HELL 

and constantly improving lot of the blessed, 
coupled with the firm conviction that ours 
tends to grow worse and worse — how bad we 
do not know. 

'^ Another of our sorrows is the paucity of 
means for improving or even maintaining 
one's present moral condition here. 

''Yet another is the terrible power which 
the great mass of bitter, hating, and malevo- 
lent minds, gathered here, has upon yours to 
depress and degrade it. 

'' The science of thought-transference had 
been little explored on the earth when I left it. 
Here all communication is carried on in that 
way and that which we used to call hypno- 
tizing and was done with an effort on earth, is 
oftentimes done unconsciously here and can 
be accomplished with ease when a dozen or a 
score or a hundred combine to overpower one 
other mind. 

^' So that in a place like this, to which the 
wicked and only the wicked have been com- 
ing since the first man died on earth, the vast 



A COMMON-SENSE HELL 71 

preponderance of minds are filled with enmity 
against God, malice, stupidity, ignorance, in- 
gratitude, grossness, hate, avarice, arrogance, 
vanity, blasphemy, covetousness, stubborn- 
ness, sensuousness, cupidity, cruelty, discon- 
tent, surliness, envy, selfishness, egotism, sus- 
picion, fierceness, ribaldry, revengefulness, 
fraud, perversity, fanaticism, greed, pride, 
harshness, insolence, irritability, irreverence, 
meanness, insubordination, intolerance, ma- 
levolence, intemperance, impiety, lust, lying, 
and many other vices, and it is a hard matter 
indeed for the repentant, struggling and as- 
piring soul to make any headway against this 
sodden moral atmosphere, that here surrounds 
it and weighs it down. 

'^ The intensifying tendency of all vices when 
long practiced, was not much understood on 
earth. Our lives did not endure long enough 
there to demonstrate it fully. Here you feel 
it in all its dreadful perfection. 

" For instance, the man who indulged a 
spirit of hatred all his life on earth, started 



72 A COMMON-SENSE HELL 

his new life here with a strong bent for hatred 
and after a few centuries of hating, without 
once experiencing that relief which comes 
from inflicting harm upon the object of one's 
hatred, he is constantly tortured with a wholly 
unsatisfied, unavenged, and unavengeable 
hatred for all things, including God and 
himself. 

''The jealous have by brooding over the 
subject become sure that the blessed did not 
deserve heaven any more than they them- 
selves did. 

*' The proud have become too proud to seek 
forgiveness even if it were to be had, now 
that they have defied God and thrown their 
chances away. 

'' The selfish can no longer gloat over pos- 
sessing things which their fellows must go 
without, but are constantly tortured by think- 
ing of all those things which are denied them 
but which the blessed enjoy with their glori- 
fied bodies, for we know ' that as the thing 
more perfect is, the more it feels of pleasure/ 



A COMMON-SENSE HELL 73 

^* There are misers here who have grown so 
miserly that the flight of time only means for 
them years and years and years in which the 
riches they left behind on earth might have 
been piling up interest for them instead of for 
their heirs. 

^' The envious have envied the blessed so 
long that they have at last come to hate the 
innocent objects of their envy. 

''And so it goes all along the line. The 
mental vices which men practiced in their 
brief lives on earth, they have continued, from 
force of habit, to practice here ; until after a 
few centuries these vices seem to have become 
totally inseparable from their souls, and each 
vice is its own particular scourge for the soul 
it inhabits. 

''A majority of the souls here, moreover, 
cling to the belief that their punishment is to 
be eternal just because they thought so on 
earth. They have no hope of salvation. They 
' have not even any hope of death,'* 

'' The despair this brings them is indescri- 



74 A COMMON-SENSE HELL 

bable and what is worse, it also hinders them 
from making any effort to improve them- 
selves.'' 

A. " Do you then hope to improve your 
lot?'' 

B. '' I hope I may." 

A. '^ On what do you found that hope ? " 

B. '^ Partly on reason and partly on revela- 
tion." 

A. ^' What is the reason on which your 
hope is partly founded ? " 

B. " A large number of the souls here 
who aspire to better their condition, have, by 
long years of discussion, reflection and obser- 
vation of the mental condition of our fellows 
in hell, come pretty unanimously to the con- 
clusion that each commission of a sin, whether 
in the body or out of the body, has the direct 
and inevitable effect of degrading the moral 
nature to a certain extent. This extent varies 
with the different sins. The degradation mani- 
fests itself in each case in an increased tendency 
to commit that sin again. Our conclusions 



A COMMON-SENSE HELL 75 

also lead us to believe that each practice of a 
virtue, whether practised in the body or out 
of the body, has the direct and inevitable 
effect of elevating the moral nature to a cer- 
tain degree. This degree varies with the dif- 
ferent virtues. The elevation manifests itself 
in an increased tendency to practice that virtue 
again. On that point I may say we are prac- 
tically unanimous. 

'' On the point of whether a being who has 
by the practice of many virtues, so elevated 
his nature that he is fitted to enter heaven — 
whether such a one, I say, has the right to 
enter there by reason of the sacrifice and 
death of Christ, without, maybe, even know- 
ing that such a sacrifice was ever made for 
him, we are not unanimous ; although those 
who maintain that such a right exists and is 
recognized, point for confirmation to the fact 
that there are far fewer souls of those whom 
Christians call ' the heathen ' here, than are 
the numbers of heathen who have died since 
man existed on the earth. These claim that 



76 A COMMONSENSE HELL 

since God knows all things, He knew from 
the beginning that Christ would some day die 
for man, and therefore men who died before 
Christ did, were covered by His sacrifice, just 
as well as men who have died since. 

'' Others of us here maintain that no such 
right as I have mentioned exists, but that 
after a soul has fitted itself by repeated acts of 
virtue for entry into heaven, it must, before 
entering heaven, and as a prime condition of 
entry, obtain forgiveness from God for any 
and all sins it has at any time committed, and 
must believe in His name, and will then ob- 
tain entry to heaven only as an act of mercy, 
and grace, granted for Christ's sake by God, 
and not as a right. 

'^ However, as I said before, we are unani- 
mous in believing that each man must make his 
own soul fit for entry into heaven, before it can 
either claim the right of entry from God or 
expect the grace of entry to be extended to it 
by God, and we are also unanimous in believ- 
ing that the only way to fit the soul for either 



A COMMON-SENSE HELL 77 

kind of entry is by the repeated practice of the 
virtues. Belief in virtue is not enough. In- 
cessant practice is absolutely necessary. The 
debasing eiFect which the practice of sin has 
upon the soul, can only be effaced by counter- 
acting it with the elevating effect which the 
practice of virtue has upon the soul. 

" We are also unanimous in believing that 
when by long and incessant practice of the 
virtues such a strong habit of doing right has 
been formed that all tendency to commit sin 
is eradicated from the soul and its only tend- 
ency is to practice virtue, that soul is perfect. 
But before that perfect state is reached, there 
is a stage in the upward progress of the soul, 
where its tendency to practice virtue is greater 
on the whole than its tendency to commit sin, 
and when that stage is reached, though all tend- 
ency to commit sin is not wholly eradicated, 
we believe that God in His infinite mercy for- 
gives and releases the soul (if it is truly re- 
pentant for its sins and shortcomings and 
humbly petitions God for forgiveness) from 



78 A COMMON-SENSE HELL 

this bodiless hell and somewhere in His 
universe allows it to avail itself once more of 
a body, with the aid of which it may at last 
make up its spiritual deficiencies and by the 
grace of God attain perfection." 

A. '^ Next tell me what is the revelation of 
which you spoke a while ago as the basis for 
your hope of winning from here to heaven." 

B. " Long, long ago, a soul came here who 
said he was part of God, sent from God, to say 
that if souls here sought to do all they could 
to make themselves fit for a better state of ex- 
istence, they would, if they believed in Him, 
be allowed to reach one. He was scoffed at, 
however. Most of the souls here then had 
passed their lives on earth without having 
heard of any God but the heathen gods. 
Some of the souls who knew what He meant 
when He said He came from God and had 
descended into hell to preach to the souls in 
purgatory and that He was a Saviour yester- 
day, to-day and forever, have by a constant 
indulgence in mental vices here, grown so mali- 



A COMMON-SENSE HELL 79 

cious and embittered that they deny that this 
celestial visitor ever came to hell at all, in 
order that they may deceive and discourage 
any who might take heart from this revela- 
tion and try to improve their condition. 
There is no Bible here, no written or printed 
record of this heavenly messenger's words. 
Only tradition ; and when even that is denied 
by many, the majority of the inhabitants of 
this place, being ignorant and unintellectual 
(as the majority is of those who are coming 
here from the earth even yet) do not benefit 
much by that tradition." 

A. "Were you a Christian while on 
earth?'' 

B. " Yes.'' 

A. ''So was I. Therefore we know that 
this tradition must be true for we are told 
that after His crucifixion, Christ descended 
into hell and preached to the souls in purga- 
tory and He certainly would preach a possible 
salvation to them, else He could not be their, 
your, my Saviour yesterday, to-day and for- 



80 A COMMON-SENSE HELL 

ever. The thought fills me with hope. I 
desire to get to heaven more now than I ever 
did before and it really seems to me that it 
will be easier to win our way to heaven from 
here than it would be to do so from the earth.'' 
B. '' How do you arrive at that conclu- 
sion ? " 

A. '' Why, while I was on earth I had 
many aspirations to lead a better life, but it 
was always my accursed body that prevented 
my realizing those aspirations. My body it 
was which weighted me down with its thirst, 
and hunger, and love of ease and luxury, with 
its lust, with its frequent pains, destroying the 
temper and causing peevishness and impa- 
tience ; with its love of fine clothing and 
houses and wealth. But now that I am rid 
of that weak body, now that I am all soul, I 
feel that it will be a comparatively easy mat- 
ter to reform and lead a better life. I will 
set about it at once." 

B. '' Good. What will you do first ? " 

A. " I will begin to weed out of my soul 



A COMMON-SENSE HELL 81 

the sin which I most indulged in upon earth. 
I was ever selfish. I lived mainly for myself, 
until selfishness became part of my nature ; 
but now I will cultivate generosity, that 
thereby my soul may be made somewhat 
more fit than it is now to enter heaven.^' 

B. " You will be generous, eh ? Well, 
what will you give away ? Money ? Cloth- 
ing? Food? Have you any here to give? 
No. Do any of us here want those things? 
No. And if you had vast quantities of those 
things, how would it elevate your nature to 
give away what you could not possibly use ? 
It is only the self-denial involved in giving 
that elevates the soul of the giver.'' 

A. '^Your point is well taken. To give 
away while on earth money, food, or other 
things which my body then craved would 
have had a good effect on me, but I neglected 
the opportunity. Well, if I may not practice 
generosity here, then I will practice chas- 
tity?'' 

B. *' But you have no body with which to 



82 A COMMON-SENSE HELL 

be unclean, libidinous, adulterous, lecherous, 
unchaste. You can see no sight here to ex- 
cite carnal passion. How shall you restrain 
yourself from doing what it is impossible for 
you to do ? How remove from your soul the 
debasing effects of repeated indulgences in las- 
civiousness, when there is no person or thing 
here which can supply even a temptation, 
much less a gratification, that you might gain 
spiritual strength by resisting or declining?'' 

A. '' I see now that when I had a passion- 
ate, lascivious body was the time to have 
schooled my soul in resisting temptation to or 
declining the gratification of lust. It is too 
late now. But if I may not practice gener- 
osity or chastity here, I will set about restrain- 
ing my avaricious nature. Henceforth I will 
not covet my neighbor's possessions." 

B. " Covet what ? You have all that any 
one else has here." 

A. '' I will not steal." 

B. *^ There is nothing here to steal." 

A. " I will not kill, nor be tyrannical, nor 



A COMMON-SENSE HELL 83 

cruel, nor seek revenge, nor indulge in glut- 
tony, nor drunkenness, nor gambling, nor 
cheating, nor any sin of that kind to which I 
was so prone on earth." 

B. '' Of course you will not, because you 
cannot. I tell you no one can voluntarily ab- 
stain here from a single sin which he com- 
mitted with the help of his body on earth and 
therefore it follows that he cannot elevate his 
spiritual nature by the practice of a single 
virtue which would tend directly to eradicate 
from his make-up the deterioration which the 
commission of those sins wrought upon his 
spiritual being while on earth ; or in other 
words to eradicate that tendency to commit 
them which long practice of them has made a 
part of his very nature. He cannot practice 
generosity, unselfishness, self-denial, charity, 
purity, temperance, mercy, chastity, or sobriety 
in any effective degree here ? " 

A. '^ Then indeed I begin to perceive that 
instead of blaming my poor body for my many 
shortcomings on earth, I should have looked 



84 A COMMON-SENSE HELL 

upon its weaknesses, its desires, its frailty as 
so many opportunities bountifully provided by 
my Maker for the purification and improve- 
ment of my soul, until it should become fit to 
enter upon a higher sphere of existence. But 
surely you have not enumerated all the virtues 
which good men practice. There must be 
others. Let me think. I have it. I will 
practice patience. I will be humble. I will 
not curse God or my fate. I will not envy the 
blessed." 

B. *^ That is, you will submit to what you 
cannot resist. You will not covet what you 
know you cannot get. Not curse the Being 
in whose favor your only hope lies. It seems 
to me you may practice those little virtues a 
long time without wiping out the stains of the 
many sins you committed on earth ; and with- 
out elevating yourself to a state fit to associate 
with those who when they had bodies ^ prac- 
ticed the grand virtues — not such contempti- 
ble little ones as humility — a lap-dog virtue at 
best. You see a soul that was filled, say, with 



A COMMON-SENSE HELL 85 

humility, if it were admitted to heaven and 
provided with a new and spiritualized or 
glorified body could not be trusted on that 
ground only to refrain from the practice of 
dishonesty, lechery, and a dozen other sins the 
tendency to commit which had become, 
through practice of those sins on earth, part 
of its spiritual nature.'' 

A. '' Then I will practice honesty, devo- 
tion, peacefulness, cheerfulness, contentment, 
reverence, obedience, faith, hopefulness, gen- 
tleness, diligence, candor, conscientiousness, 
dutifulness, piety, perseverance, pity, trustful- 
ness, tolerance, modesty, love, fairness, justice, 
and sympathy. Surely one does not need a 
body to practice these.'' 

B. ''It is true that those virtues you have 
just named can be practiced to a certain limited 
extent without a body and in that fact lies our 
hope of escape from this state of existence, but 
if you will think it over you will see that all 
of them could be practiced much more fre- 
quently if we had bodies. Take honesty, for 



86 A COMMON-SEKSE HELL 

instance. It was always easy to be honest 
when there was nothing to gain by deceit, and 
nothing to lose by candor. What could you 
gain here by lying to or cheating your fellows ? 
Devotion to a person or cause is much more 
easy to maintain when something is to be 
gained thereby, than when suflFering, persecu- 
tion, poverty, disgrace, hunger, thirst, blows, 
prison, are to be endured because of it. Who 
will do you harm here if you practice devotion? 
The same remarks apply to the role of peace- 
maker here. You can only advise peace here 
and advice was always the easiest thing to 
give away that we had on earth. Obedience 
is good discipline when it involves carrying 
out a distasteful or onerous command. Who 
will give you commands here ? You can be 
as gentle as you like here, but how could you 
be rough ? What will you be diligent at ? 
At thinking? Some of the laziest men on 
earth were constant thinkers. What difficul- 
ties or dangers will you persevere in the face 
of? Will you be tolerant of the habits or be- 



A COMMON-SENSE HELL 87 

liefs of those you cannot control ? Of course 
you will, but it would have been better to 
have practiced tolerance on earth towards 
those you did control. Love works its highest 
good on that man who sacrifices most for it. 
What will you sacrifice here? Justice goes 
out from the powerful to the weak. You are 
no stronger than the rest of us now. Pity, 
sympathy, piety, in the abstract, never did 
much to elevate that man on earth who never 
let his sympathy, pity, piety, lead to the per- 
formance of any active benevolence upon the 
objects of his pity or sympathy. Moreover 
and above all, you would be practicing those 
virtues, on those rare occasions when you 
could find a chance to do so without a body to 
provide opportunities for you, with a really 
selfish motive — the redemption of your own in- 
dividual soul from hell ; and selfishness sinks 
and degrades the soul more surely than any 
other vice ; — more than the practice of a few 
somewhat colorless and passive virtues could 
offiset. 



88 A COMMON-SENSE HELL 

^^ Suppose once more that having practiced 
all these purely mental virtues for a long 
period, your soul should be admitted to the 
sphere of the blessed, and receive a spiritual- 
ized and glorified body, full of the pulses of 
youth and health, do you suppose your soul 
could be trusted to use that body aright? — 
your soul that was still imbued with a strong 
tendency to indulge in the active vices of 
selfishness, greed, avariciousness, pride, arro- 
gance, lechery, tyranny, cruelty, deceit, over- 
reaching, intemperance, thievery, gluttony — 
still imbued with these vices because you had 
found no opportunity here in hell to acquire 
the habit of practicing their opposites ? Would 
you not quickly introduce a discordant note 
into heaven ? I think you would. Yet some 
of us are convinced that after we have for a 
long time practiced here such virtues as we 
can find opportunity to practice, we may set 
up in ourselves so strong a tendency to prac- 
tice virtue on all occasions, as will offset the 
tendency to practice vice on all occasions, which 



A COMMON-SENSE HELL 89 

was established in our spiritual natures by the 
practice of vice while we were in the body. 
Then we may be trusted with another body. 
But when one considers how feiv will be the 
opportunities offered here to practise those 
virtues which can be practised without a body 
to provide the opportunity, the outlook is in- 
deed dark. 

A. '^ Do you see any ray of light? '' 

B. ^' Yes. God does not wish to keep us 
here. He will take us from here just as soon 
as we fit ourselves for a change and ask His 
forgiveness for our sins and shortcomings 
with genuine repentance. Just as soon as I 
or you or any one here can train his spirit so 
that he shall always have a stronger tendency 
to do good than to do evil, though his tend- 
ency to do evil be not entirely eliminated, 
God is willing to entrust us with another op- 
portunity, another body.'' 

A. '^ How will you set about reaching that 
stage of spiritual attainment?" 

B. '* Well, I have brooded over this subject 



90 A COMMON-SENSE HELL 

for many long years and I have come to the 
conclusion that besides practising all the men- 
tal virtues I can without a body, some means 
must be found here in hell for the practice of 
some sort of wholly unselfish self-denial in 
order that the fallen state of our souls may be 
appreciably improved." 

A. ^' Why self-denial?'' 

B. '^ Because Christ said when the lawyer 
asked Him which was the chief command- 
ment : ^ Thou shalt love the Lord thy God 
with all thy heart and with all thy soul and 
with all thy mind. This is the first and the 
great commandment and the second is like 
unto it. Thou shalt love thy neighbor as 
thyself On these two commandments hang 
all the law and the prophets.' 

^' Now I cannot love God or my neighbor 
by just resolving to do so. Disinterested love 
is only engendered in the human breast by 
making sacrifices for that object which it is 
desired to love. Therefore, if I can find any 
form of unselfish self-sacrifice, any form of de- 



A COMMON-SEFSE HELL 91 

nying myself for God or for my fellows here, 
I am going to practice thaV^ 

A. '^ Do you think you have found any 
way, then, of practicing such self-denial here ? '' 

B. ^' I think so. Perhaps so ; perhaps not. 
Who can tell ? But my plan is this : 

^' One of the few alleviations of our disap- 
pointment in hell is to revolve over and over 
in our minds memories of the pleasures we 
enjoyed when we had bodies. The drunkard 
recalls again the delightful feelings which ac- 
companied the slaking of his thirst for liquor. 
The glutton devours once more in memory 
the favorite dishes he ate on earth. The lib- 
ertine wallows in the reminiscences of his 
former debauches. The proud review their 
triumphs. The selfish dwell on the good 
things they once possessed and so on through 
all the list. 

*^ But the indulgence in these memories is 
nothing more or less than re-indulgence in 
the commission of those sins. Therefore my 
plan is to bar from my mind resolutely all 



92 A COMMON-SENSE HELL 

indulgence in these degrading memories and 
to recall to mind as often as possible those 
few unselfish and ennobling acts which I per- 
formed with the aid of my body when I had 
one ; and by dwelling on the uplifting influ- 
ence which those produced upon me, try to 
elevate my own lost soul a little. 

^' Moreover I will resolutely dismiss from 
my mind all hope of ever leaving here. I 
will also endeavor to persuade my fellow lost 
souls to give up selfishly seeking to go to 
heaven from here ; but instead, to devote 
themselves to creating a sort of minor heaven 
right here for their fellows. I will also as- 
siduously practice every virtue which I can 
practice without the aid of a body." 

A. ^* And do you think, that after ages of 
this kind of effort, you will attain a state of 
spiritual advancement where your tendency 
to do right will overbalance your tendency to 
do wrong?'' 

B. '^ I believe so. However, I will not 
allow myself to think of that. I hope though, 



A COMMON-SENSE HELL 93 

that my fellows here will be made happier by 
my efforts and that God will be pleased at 
seeing them made happier/' 

A. ^^ Have you accomplished any good 
yet : brought any soul around to your 
views?" 

B. "A few. You, yourself, have afforded 
me some opportunity to do good by directing 
you and enlightening you and keeping you 
from that total despair which often over- 
whelms souls on their arrival here and which 
might have overwhelmed you had some ma- 
levolent lost soul misinformed you as to what 
and where you are and what is the nature of 
that sphere of your existence upon which 
you are now entering.'' 

A. " You certainly have helped me. I 
will try to follow your example and so order 
my existence here that I may fit myself for 
something better. I am indeed relieved to 
find that hell is not a lake of fire and that it 
is not necessarily an eternal punishment for 
any one soul ; but I am filled with regret as I 



94 A COMMON-SENSE HELL 

realize that the chances I have here of im- 
proving my spiritual nature are infinitely less 
in number than they were when I possessed 
that weak and frail body on which I blamed 
so many of my sins. I now perceive that life 
in the body is indeed synonymous with oppor- 
tunity.^* 



The foregoing seems to me, Arthur, my 
son, to depict a common-sense hell — to be a 
logical and reasonable deduction from the 
premises, already conceded by you, that the 
soul of the sinner receives no body after he 
leaves this earth. 

Let those who choose to believe, or who can 
believe in hell fire, cling to that doctrine, if 
they will ; but let those who cannot bring 
themselves to believe in a hell of never end- 
ing physical torture from unquenchable flame, 
reflect on this common-sense hellj and see if it 
does not exculpate God from the charge of 
being a monster of vindictive cruelty while at 
the same time full recognition is given to the 



A COMMON-SENSE HELL 95 

fact that sin must be punished with a degree 
of severity which will impel the sinner to 
seek to avoid that punishment with all his 
energy. 

What do you, my son, think of the hell 
here depicted ? 

J* Go R. 



Letter No. XIX 

IS GOD VINDICTIVE? 



Princeton University^ April 20. 
My dear Father : 

Your sketch of a hell without fire is a 
logical and reasonable deduction from the con- 
ceded premises that the sinner's soul gets no 
body after death, and certainly you have sub- 
stituted for hell fire a form of mental punish- 
ment which, although it falls far short of the 
traditional horrors of the bottomless pit, is 
yet sufficiently terrible to spur any man into 
an effort to escape it. I have often wondered 
why God gave us such feeble and passionate 
bodies. Now I know. You have shown me 
that they are the wonderful tools by which we 
may fit our still more wonderful souls for a 
higher state of existence. But there is one 

point you have not cleared up ; and that is 

96 



A COMMON-SENSE HELL 97 

the objection which you yourself raised against 
the church's doctrine that God is love, while 
yet He condemns the souls of sinners to the 
terrible doom you have outlined, just be- 
cause of the committal of the comparatively 
few sins they had time to commit during 
their brief lives upon earth. 

Is not the punishment, even in your com- 
mon-sense and fireless hell, so far in excess of 
the sin, that it suggests a vindictive God, 
rather than a God of love ? 

Your loving son, 

Arthur. 



Letter No. XX 

GOD IS NOT VINDICTIVE 



Drexel Building, Wall Street, 
New York, April 25. 
My dear Arthur : 

It seems to me that there is nothing 
vindictive or revengeful on the part of God 
in permitting sinners after death to go to a 
hell such as I have described. On the other 
hand it seems impossible that He should do 
otherwise. For these souls could not be al- 
lowed to associate with the souls of the good, 
because that would be unfair to the good, who 
having made a proper use of their frail bodies 
on earth, have received glorified and spiritual- 
ized bodies or entities with which they may 
push on to perfection. These could not in the 
nature of things associate with the disem- 
bodied spirits of the wicked any more than 

98 



A COMMON-SENSE HELL 99 

we could associate with disembodied spirits on 
earth. 

If God gave to the wicked in the next world 
bodies which were less frail and more perfect 
than those He gave in this, their wicked 
moral natures would commit more sin and do 
more harm with those superior bodies than 
they did with their frail earthly bodies. The 
popular idea of a devil — a malignant soul in 
a supernaturally efficient body — is an illustra- 
tion of what I mean. 

On the other hand to the souls of the wicked 
God would be showing no kindness by allow- 
ing them to take their earthly bodies into hell 
with them, because they had already demon- 
strated on earth that they would not use those 
bodies to elevate themselves with, but rather 
to debase themselves with. They had their 
opportunity here on earth when each had a 
body and would not avail himself of it. 

In all probability if they had lived five 
hundred years on earth, instead of less than 
one hundred, they would have been five times 



100 A COMMON-SENSE HELL 

more debased when they came to die (through 
steady misuse of their bodies and manifold 
repetition of sins resulting in a confirmed 
tendency to sin on all occasions) than they 
were when they did die. 

They had plenty of warning. In the Bible 
there is repeated again and again the state- 
ment that the foolish or wicked servant who 
makes an ill use or no use at all of the talent 
intrusted to him, will have his original talent 
taken away from him. In taking away from 
them the talent (the body) which they used 
for their own degradation, God did not deprive 
them of all chance of redemption, but the 
fact that their chances to improve in hell are 
fewer than their chances to improve were on 
earth, is not to be imputed to God but rather 
they themselves are to blame, for they spurned 
the chances the body afforded and they would 
have continued to degrade themselves by a 
wicked use of the body as long as they had a 
body. 

That the kind of hell I have outlined is 



A COMMON-SENSE HELL 101 

eternal, is also a matter of necessity. Sinners 
will always be dying and their souls will al- 
ways be passing into that state of existence. 
And some of the sinners in hell will always 
be committing new sins. Some will always 
be refusing to yield a loving response to God's 
undying love, some will be rejecting through- 
out all eternity that peace and joy which ac- 
companies reconciliation with God, some will 
always be in a state of active rebellion, 
separation and alienation from God, and just 
so long as this attitude towards God continues, 
so long also must the self-inflicted punishment 
that is inherent in such a state of mind con- 
tinue. For even a loving God cannot coerce 
love, and to forgive sins before the sinner is 
repentant, only hardens the sinner in his evil 
doing. But the punishment brought on sin- 
ners in hell by their own sins is not necessarily 
eternal for any one souly and the way for a soul 
in hell to make himself worthy of heaven is 
within reach of all, as we have seen. 

This frees God from the awful calumny of 



102 A COMMON-SENSE HELL 

deliberately condemning a soul to a never- 
ending punishment for the sins committed 
during a few years on earth. The sins com- 
mitted by the wicked in hell, if continued 
indefinitely, will, of course, necessitate an in- 
definite banishment from heaven ; but this 
punishment follows inherently upon the sin, 
and cannot be attributed to vengefulness on 
the part of God. 

This line of argument touches now so 
closely upon that which I will use to prove 
to you the absolute justness of God towards 
every one of His creatures, that I will end this 
letter here and take up that subject with you 
to-morrow. 

Your affectionate father, 

J. G. R. 



Letter No. XXI 

THE JUSTNESS OP GOD 



Drexel Building, Wall Street, 
New York, April 26. 
My dear Arthur : 

You have admitted that it is reasonable 
and that it throws new light upon God's plan 
of salvation to suppose that the soul of the sin- 
ner gets no body to inhabit after that sinner's 
death. That admission has led us logically, 
step by step, to the conclusion that this 
earthly body is the chief instrument by which 
we, through the grace of God, may prepare our 
souls to enter heaven. If you admit this sec- 
ond proposition to be true, I can prove to you 
logically that God is just. But I cannot 
prove it otherwise, nor have I met any one 
who can. On any other basis God seems to be 

highly unjust and partial and to show abso- 

103 



104 A COMMON-SENSE HELL 

lutely unaccountable favoritism to some of 
His creatures, while He loads others with stu- 
pendous handicaps. 

Let me start by relating an extreme case of 
seemingly divine injustice which came under 
my own observation. I take an extreme case 
because that will afford a supreme test of 
God's justice or partiality. 

A young man of my native village, whom I 
will call C, after courting the most beautiful 
girl of all that countryside, entered into an 
engagement to marry her. We will call the 
girl B. She had been piously brought up. 
She was modest, pure, innocent and good. 
Her parents were poor. His parents were 
well-to-do and worldly and desired a better 
match for their son — better from a financial 
point of view. They had no possible objec- 
tion to the girl herself C was afraid to brave 
their anger by announcing the engagement. 
He besought B to marry him secretly. She 
refused. 

He was a youth of fast habits though she 



A COMMON-SENSE HELL 105 

did not know it. Calling on her one night 
when her parents were out of town on a visit, 
he easily induced her to eat some candy which 
was dragged. Before she recovered from the 
effects of the drug, the man she loved and 
trusted had accomplished her ruin. With all 
the solemnity he was able to feel, he tried, 
when she realized the wrong that had befallen 
her, to assuage her tears and indignant lamen- 
tations with a promise that he would make 
her his bride before all the world if their 
secret was ever in danger of being found out. 
He thought that he now had her in his power 
sufficiently to insure a continuance of guilty 
relations between them. But he had under- 
estimated the virtuous nature of the girl. 
Scornfully she repulsed him, and dearly as 
she loved him, she assured him he would 
never see her alone again until she was his 
acknowledged and lawful wife. 

She persisted in this resolution for some 
weeks, but weakened when he threatened to 
go away from home, change his name, and 



106 A COMMON-SENSE HELL 

never return. As an alternative he made a 
solemn vow that he would marry her instantly, 
in spite of paternal wrath or of anything 
else, if their guilty secret should ever be dis- 
covered. 

The weak girl, fearing desertion and still 
loving the man, yielded under this solemn 
promise of marriage. Before long she was 
obliged to tell her lover that she was about to 
become a mother and that he must now fulfil 
his promise. The hound fled that night, leav- 
ing no clew by which he could be traced. He 
left no property from which she could have 
collected damages, had she had worldliness 
enough to sue him or make any claim against 
his parents. But she had not the spirit for 
that. Her heart was broken over the treach- 
ery, the despicable meanness, of the man she 
loved. Her stern old father found her in 
tears. Guessing at her secret when he learned 
that her lover had disappeared, he wrung a 
confession from her and harshly ordered her 
out of his house. She sought the great city 



A COMMON-SENSE HELL 107 

of New York in which to hide her shame. 
General housework was the only remunerative 
kind of toil she had the skill to perform, but 
she was unable to get employment for long. 
As soon as her condition was observed, she 
was turned away. Finally, almost starving, 
she, in her ignorance of the wickedness of 
great cities, answered an attractive looking 
advertisement in a newspaper. Calling at the 
comfortably furnished house indicated, she 
was received by the white haired, good- 
natured looking mistress, who at once hired 
her, in spite of her condition, at good wages, 
and put her to work in the kitchen. The 
other servants were kind and the work was 
light. The mistress kept a boarding house 
for young ladies, B was told. It was three 
or four days before she was allowed to learn 
that she was in a house of ill-fame. At first 
she wanted to leave it ; but she had not a cent 
of her own money left, and the place was so 
comfortable, the work so light, the wages so 
high and her coming confinement (for which 



108 A COMMON-SENSE HELL 

some money must be saved) was so near at 
hand, that she weakly hesitated. '' After all/' 
she thought in bitter despair, 'Hhe world 
draws little distinction between such as I am 
and such as the people in this house are, and 
I must live." No attempt was made to intro- 
duce her to the men who visited the house. 
So she stayed. 

When the time for her confinement ap- 
proached, the mistress of the house would not 
hear of B going to a hospital. She was told of 
the terrible things that might happen to her 
there and was frightened with stories of how 
the surgeons loved to experiment, for the 
good of the rich, upon the bodies of the sick 
poor. The best of care and attention were 
promised her by the mistress of the house if 
she would remain where she was. So B re- 
mained. The child was born and in a few 
weeks died. B grieved bitterly for her babe, 
but could not help feeling, through it all, that 
it was better so, for both of them. 

Meantime expenses had been running up. 



A COMMON-SENSE HELL 109 

They had all been defrayed by the mistress of 
the house who would not listen to B's profuse 
thanks for her generosity. However the mis- 
tress had not neglected to procure B's signa- 
ture to sundry ^^ promises to pay ^' after her 
recovery. With the restoration of health, 
even sorrow could not prevent a return of B's 
beauty of face and figure. When she spoke 
about going to work again in the kitchen, she 
was informed that all the help that was needed 
was employed there already. It was not long 
before poor B was gently but firmly made 
aware that she was expected to become one of 
the '^ lady boarders." With all her soul she 
rebelled at this and essayed to leave the house 
at once. Suddenly, the heretofore indulgent 
mistress, changed into the cruel procuress. A 
corrupt police administration was then in 
power and a policeman in the secret pay of 
the house was called in to arrest B for debt. 
Even the clothes B had on were the property 
of the mistress, as B's own signature showed. 
Her own working clothes had vanished while 



110 A COMMON-SENSE HELL 

she was ill. She was ignorant of her rights 
before the law. The policeman cowed her 
with his brutal threats and his grim account 
of the jail he would take her to. In mortal 
fear she tried to run from the house. A blow 
on the head from the policeman's club knocked 
her senseless. When she came to, she realized 
that her degradation had again been accom- 
plished. She had no clothes now, but a night 
dress and the door of her room (an inner 
room with no outlet upon street or yard) was 
locked on the outside. Here she was kept a 
prisoner until she had been literally starved 
and cajoled by turns into submission. 

She remained an inmate of that house for 
several years. Then a reform police adminis- 
tration came into power, the house was raided 
suddenly one night by the police and B, with 
six other inmates, was sent to prison. The 
humiliations of prison life ate into B's heart 
and when she got out, self-respect seemed to 
have almost entirely left her. She took to 
drink to drown her sorrows. She went from 



A COMMON-SENSE HELL 111 

bad to worse, according to the gradations 
which obtain in the ranks of outcasts. She 
finally became a confirmed opium-eater. 
Missionaries tried hard to save her. From 
them I learned her painful history. But their 
efforts were in vain. She gradually became as 
impure and as defiled in her mind as in her 
body. Disease attacked her and her ^' market 
value " fell so low that she finally could make 
a living only in resorts for the lowest sort of 
Chinamen and negroes. About fifteen years 
after she came to New York she was mortally 
injured in a drunken brawl in a Bowery 
brothel and died in a few days, cursing and 
unrepentant. 

During those fifteen years, the man who had 
started this once pure and innocent girl on the 
downward road, had prospered. He had fied 
to the West and had been lucky in mining 
ventures and in real estate. After making a 
fortune he retired from active business to enjoy 
it. A severe illness set him thinking of the 
hereafter. He almost died and in his fear, 



112 A COMMON-SEKSB HELL 

vowed that if God would spare his life he 
would atone for his great sin. The sincerity 
of his repentance was apparent from the fact 
that on recovering, he came back east to his 
native town, took up the trail of the girl 
where it had vanished in this great city, and 
declared that he would find her and marry 
her, if she were still willing, in order that he 
might make all the reparation possible. As 
he traced her desperate history by means of 
police records and mission society reports, his 
sorrow was pitiful. He told me all about it 
and I really thought he would commit 
suicide, through brooding over her terrible 
fate and the fact that it was impossible for 
him to make her any reparation. The re- 
mainder of his life and the greater part of his 
fortune he devoted to the rescue of such other 
fallen women as would allow anybody to 
rescue them. Many a Magdalene lived to 
thank him for plucking her from the gutter 
and giving her a start upon the road to 
respectability again ; but he never forgot the 



A COMMON-SENSE HELL 113 

woman he had thrust into the mire and that 
kept him always humble and repentant. 
After a score of years passed in this work, 
while giving many other evidences daily of a 
great and true piety, he died, and if ever a 
man went to heaven, he did. 

Now tell me, Arthur, what logical^ common- 
sense argument the church can advance to 
prove that God, looking upon the seducer in 
heaven and upon his once innocent victim in 
hell, can declare that He has acted with 
perfect impartiality between this woman and 
this man. 

Your affectionate father, 

J. G. R. 



Letter No. XXII 

A HAED EIDDLB TO SOLVE 



Princeton University j May 1. 
My dear Father : 

Your last letter certainly presents a 
case for consideration which makes a strong 
draft upon one's faith, if he wishes to believe 
that God found some way to do that wretched 
girl justice. But I can think of no way to 
demonstrate logically and clearly how this 
could be done. As you truly said in a former 
letter, I have been taught by my spiritual ad- 
visers that when the wicked man dies, he is 
punished by being sent to hell ; and that when 
the good man dies, he is rewarded by being 
sent to heaven. But this sort of doctrine 
leaves one to infer that the good man who has 
prospered on earth, will go to exactly the 

114 



A COMMON-SENSE HELL 115 

same heaven as the good man who has met all 
kinds of misfortunes on earth ; and also that 
the bad man who prospers on earth, will go 
to exactly the same hell as the bad man 
who suffers hardship all his life upon this 
earth. 

If this be true, then certainly great favorit- 
ism and partiality are shown, if we consider 
the life of man here and hereafter as one 
existence of the soul. 

But inadequate as the church's doctrine is 
to explain such cases as I have mentioned, it 
seems preposterously inadequate to explain such 
a case as we have in your history of the girl 
and the man, where the wrong-doer must be 
admitted to have entered on an eternity of 
happiness when he died (admitted, that is, by 
all who believe that sincere repentance, fol- 
lowed by good works, and faith in God's 
willingness to forgive, is the road to salvation) 
and where his victim must be admitted to 
have gone to hell (admitted, that is, by all 
who believe that evil works, unrepentance, 



116 A COMMON-SENSE HELL 

and neglect to obtain forgiveness from God, is 
the way to earn damnation). 

Can you explain this sad riddle logically, 
father? I shall indeed be surprised if you 
can. 

Your loving son, 

Arthur. 



Letter No. XXIII 

GOD'S JUSTICE PEOVEN 



Drexel Building, Wall Street^ 
New Yorky May 5. 
My dear Arthur : 

If the girl, B, when she found that her 

lover had been false to her, or at any other 

stage of her career, had said to herself : 

^^ True, I have been ruined and abandoned 
by a villain, but I will endeavor as hard as I 
can to forgive him. 

'^ True, I am henceforth to be ostracized by 
moral people, but I will try as hard as I can 
not to hate them for so doing, or to envy 
them their spotless records. 

^^ Henceforth I will have a hard and bitter 

struggle to earn a living, but I will work my 

fingers to the bone, I will endure actual star- 

117 



118 A COMMON SENSE HELL 

vation, to the death even, before I will again 
prostitute my body, and I will spend the re- 
mainder of my days repenting of my sins, 
seeking forgiveness from God, and trying to 
raise those who have fallen even lower than I 
have." 

And if she had stuck to those vows, through 
thick and thin, she would have elevated her 
spiritual nature and prepared herself for entry 
by the grace of God into a better world. And 
the elevation of her spiritual nature would 
have proceeded exactly in 'proportion to the 
heaviness of the burden placed upon her by her 
deceiver and by the world. 

What I mean by that is, that if the man 
should do anything which would make it 
easy for her to forgive him, her forgiving of 
him would then elevate her spiritual nature 
in a lesser degree than if he had done nothing 
to make it easy for her. In fact if he had 
subsequently traduced her, or hounded her, or 
persecuted her, or in any way made it harder 
for her to forgive him than it was after his 



A COMMON-SENSE HELL 119 

first .act of treachery — and if yet after all, she 
did forgive him — the uplifting of her spiritual 
nature would thereby be the greater still. 

Again, if social ostracism proved not so 
severe in her case, as it generally does, then 
her forbearance with that trait of society, and 
her abstention from indulging in hatred to- 
wards society, would be less uplifting to her 
spiritual nature, than if the ostracism were 
most severe and yet she endured it with pa- 
tience and fortitude. 

Moreover, if it proved easy for her to earn a 
living without sin, her abstention from adopt- 
ing sinful methods to earn a living would not 
uplift her spiritual nature in so great a degree 
as would be the case if she had to struggle 
hard and endure much privation and hunger, 
in order to make a living without sin. 

Hence we see that God was willing to make 
all the sorrows which befell this woman, step- 
ping stones by which she might have obtained 
a high degree of fitness for the better world, 
if she had accepted the chance which was 



120 A COMMON-SENSE HELL 

always open to her, up to the last day of her 
life on earth. 

As for the man in such case, the ease with 
which he escaped the first consequences of his 
sin and established himself successfully in a 
new State, would be sure to harden his heart 
to a certain extent and make him more prone 
to commit the same sin over again, than he 
would have been if punishment for his sin 
had overtaken him at once. The winning of 
wealth would place new obstacles in his way, 
for is not Christ on record as saying : ^' How 
hardly shall a rich man enter into the king- 
dom of heaven '^ ? Christ knew the powerful 
tendency which the possession of riches has 
to dwarf the better impulses of the soul and 
nourish all the selfish ones. The respect with 
which C's fellow men regarded him, not 
knowing of his act of miserable treachery 
towards B, would have a tendency to fill him 
with vanity and self-sufficiency and deprive 
his soul of any tendency to humility and re- 
pentance for his crime. AH this handicap, if 



A COMMON-SENSE HELL 121 

I may so call it, in the race for eternal life, 
fell upon C and when he did overcome it all 
and did repent of his sin, it was harder for 
him by his subsequent self-denials and good 
works to elevate his spiritual nature than if 
he had fallen into such unfortunate circum- 
stances immediately after deserting the girl 
that repentance for his sin would have come 
earlier in his career. It was harder for him, 
because the tendency to do wrong had been 
strengthened within him by every act of 
wrong which he had committed. Moreover, 
the obligations which his wealth and good 
fortune put him under, made it much more 
difl&cult for him to come up to the require- 
ments of God, than would be the case had he 
met with only evil fortune, for is it not writ- 
ten : '^ Unto whom much is given, from him 
shall much be required " ? 

Therefore we see that God dealt out to this 
man and this woman equal opportunities to 
fit themselves for heaven and their own sins 
loaded them with equal handicaps. One im- 



122 A COMMON-SENSE HELL 

proved these opportunities, and overcame 
those handicaps ; the other did not. 

Now let us take the case of a chronic inva- 
lid or a physically deformed person, and con- 
trast what God has done for him with what 
God has done for a person of splendid health 
and physique. 

How easy it is, comparatively, for the man 
of splendid health to be cheerful and how 
hard for the sick man to be cheerful ! How 
easy for the healthy man to be contented and 
how hard for the sick man ! How easy for 
the healthy man to be generous to the poor 
(because he feels little dread for the future, 
being confident that he will be well able to 
earn again all that he gives away) ! How 
hard for the sick man to be generous with his 
money to the poor, because he feels doubtful 
of his ability to earn more to replace that 
which he gives away ! How comparatively 
easy for the healthy man to control his 
temper ! How hard for the sick man, with 
shattered nerves, to control his temper ! 



A COMMON-SENSE HELL 123 

How easy for the healthy man to shake off 
laziness ! How hard for the sick man ! How 
comparatively easy for the healthy man to 
avoid lying and deceit in his business (since 
he feels so well able to make his fight for a 
living openly) or to avoid the intemperate 
use of strong drink, etc., etc. ! How much 
harder for the sick man to do all these things ! 
One's first inclination is to think : '' How 
unjust God has been to a chronic invalid, or 
to a deformed person, compared with what 
God has been to a man with perfect health or 
form." But if the ailing man tries his best to 
remain patient and cheerful and resigned to 
the will of God, and succeeds in so doing, in 
spite of his sickness or deformity, this dis- 
cipline will have such an elevating effect 
upon his spiritual nature as will make it 
much more fit for entry (by the grace of God) 
into heaven than if he never experienced 
those sufferings. Thus his sufferings are con- 
venient stepping-stones to heaven, if he will 
avail himself of them. 



124: A COMMON-SENSE HELL 

Moreover, the chronic invalid is not subject 
in so great a degree, as is the strong man, to 
the temptation to yield to the sins of arro- 
gance, cruelty, tyranny, lust, lechery, conceit, 
pride and vanity. The tendency to these sins 
forms the handicap of the healthy. 

While on the subject of the strong and the 
weak, consider the case of a slave and his 
master. How can God be shown to act justly 
between these two men ? Why, in this way. 
Each blow inflicted by master on slave in- 
creases the master's tendency to commit acts 
of cruelty and if after the master's death he 
goes to hell and finds that because the people 
in hell have no bodies, need no food, no 
money, nor can feel physical pain of any kind 
at all — he therefore can find no opportunity 
to counteract his acquired tendency to cruelty 
by committing any acts of mercy — then will 
he discover that each blow he laid on the back 
of that slave involved a heavy penalty which 
the master now must pay. 

On the other hand each blow received by 



A COMMON-SENSE HELL 125 

the slave from his master afforded the slave an 
opportunity to practice the virtue of forgive- 
ness. Each burden placed on the slave by 
the master, while it increased the master's 
tendency to practice selfishness also gave the 
slave another opportunity to practice patience 
and fortitude. If a slave improves these op- 
portunities, he utilizes his sorry fate here to 
fit himself for heaven. And even if, after he 
should so long have practiced these virtues 
that he had set up in himself a strong tend- 
ency to forgive, to be patient, and to display 
fortitude, under all conditions, he should 
finally go to hell for other sins, he would find 
himself there relieved of the necessity to hunt 
blindly through the years for chances to prac- 
tice these particular virtues we have enumer- 
ated, without the aid of a body. 

Therefore while the master's temporary ad- 
vantage here will prove his disadvantage here- 
after, the slave's temporary disadvantage here 
may, if the slave will, prove his advantage 
hereafter. 



126 A COMMON-SENSE HELL 

Moreover, the more cruel and the more selfish 
were the acts of the master, the greater the 
degradation of the master's spiritual nature, 
and the greater was the uplift of the soul of 
the slave, if he endured them without hatred, 
resentment or impatience. Thus is the exact 
impartiality of God in His dealing between 
master and slave vindicated. 

Again, consider the frequently heard sug- 
gestion that those suffering from incurable 
disease should mercifully be put to death. 
You have often seen that idea debated in the 
newspapers and heard it discussed in pulpits. 
Did you ever hear it refuted logically? I 
never did. The preachers generally declare 
we have no right to do this and they let it go 
at that. The editor generally calls the sug- 
gestion a reversion to the methods of savagery 
or to those of the early Greeks, and closes his 
argument with a sneer for the suggestor. 

The logical reason for refusing to end the 
pangs of a hopeless invalid, is that every 
pang he feels is for him a chance to make his 



A COMMON SENSE HELL 127 

soul more fit for heaven by practicing forti- 
tude, patience, etc., and to deprive him of those 
chances would be unjust 

This of course is no argument for the al- 
leged elevating influence on the soul, of self- 
inflicted pain. 

We have already spoken of the good man 
who has wealth and of the good man who is 
poverty-stricken ; and also of the wicked man 
who is rich and lucky and of the wicked man 
who all his life remains poor and unlucky ; 
but in considering their cases we have dwelt 
only on the fact that the apparent disadvan- 
tages of the poverty-stricken are not really 
handicaps in the race for heaven. Now let us 
consider for a moment how the worldly luck 
of the rich may really be a severe handicap 
upon him. 

You remember where Christ said : '^ It is 
easier for a camel to go through a needle's eye 
than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom 
of God.'' 

This piece of Oriental imagery about the 



128 A COMMON-SENSE HELL 

camel going through the eye of a needle was 
a familiar metaphor of that time and genera- 
tion, being used to describe anything extremely 
difficult of accomplishment and Christ em- 
ployed it because He knew His hearers would 
understand just what He meant by it. There 
was no danger that they would take it literally. 
Now why are the chances for a rich man to 
get into heaven so remote? Because every 
dollar he owns presents to the rich man an 
inevitable and unescapable dilemma. Shall 
he use it in such a way as will involve self- 
denial for a good cause ; or shall^ he use it 
for self-gratification, either in a good or bad 
cause ? If he makes that dollar a vehicle for 
self-denial in a good cause, he thus elevates 
his own spiritual nature and makes his soul a 
little more fit for heaven. If he uses it for 
self-gratification, no matter whether he does 
good or ill with the dollar ; gives it as a bribe 
to a public official or as a donation to a col- 
lege ; if he does it for self-gratification, he 
misses just that opportunity to improve his 



A COMMON-SENSE HELL 129 

spiritual nature which a corresponding self- 
denial would have produced ; and the habit 
of self-gratification fastens itself a little more 
firmly upon him, every time he indulges in 
it ; resulting in an ever-growing tendency to 
practice self-gratification again and again. 
And self-gratification is an un-Christlike at- 
tribute which, if long practiced, has a most 
insidious effect upon the soul to render it unfit 
for heaven. Christ knew how powerful is 
this effect and how difficult it is for the rich 
man, no matter how well-meaning he may be, 
to guard against it. He knew how easy it is 
for a rich man to deceive himself into think- 
ing that he is uplifting his own spiritual na- 
ture by giving away to good causes the super- 
fiuity of his possessions, an act which involves 
no real self-denial ; but which on the contrary 
often has the debasing effect of filling the soul 
with pride and vainglory, and blinding it to 
the importance of those simple, rugged virtues 
of honesty, truth-telling and mercy, and to 
that higher form of generosity which will not 



130 A COMMON-SENSE HELL 

deprive a fellow man of an equal opportunity 
to acquire money, which the rich man having 
graspingly acquired, may then give away to 
good causes. 

But for all that, it is possible for a rich man 
to get to heaven ; for you also remember, 
Arthur, that the same man whose conduct 
called out the remark of Christ's about the 
camel and the needle's eye, came to Christ 
saying : ^' Teacher, what good thing shall I 
do, that I may have eternal life? " 

Christ said to him : '^ Keep the command- 
ments/' and He enumerated them. 

The man replied : *' All these have I ob- 
served. What lack I yet? " 

Christ said : ''If thou wouldst be perfect, 
go sell that which thou hast, and give to the 
poor . . . and come, follow Me." 

Many people have interpreted this as a com- 
mand from Christ to all His followers to give 
all they have to the poor. This seems to me 
to be an unreasonable interpretation. I be- 
lieve Christ did not command in this case, but 



A GOMMON-SENSE HELL 131 

only advised a complete surrender of all the 
man's possessions to the poor. Christ had 
already told the man that keeping all the 
commandments would fit him for eternal life ; 
but the man demanded to be shown a way to 
attain a still higher degree of fitness and then 
Christ said (in effect) : 

"Oh, well, if you desire to be absolutely 
perfecty give all you own to the poor and come 
endure with Me the life of extreme self-ab- 
negation which I am leading/' 

This shows that real self-denial is the path 
by which the rich man may get to heaven, if 
coupled with the practice of the other virtues. 
But common sense and experience teach us 
that real self-denial can be practised by the 
rich man without giving his possessions away. 
There are many other methods ; though they 
may be hard to find and harder to practise ; 
but that is the reason why Christ did not com- 
mand this man to give away his substance but 
only advised that course, if he, having made 
himself fit for eternal life by observing all the 



132 A COMMON-SENSE HELL 

commandments, still wished to attain a higher 
degree of fitness and make himself absolutely 
perfect. 

We have seen how men may escape being 
everlastingly cut off from their heritage of 
eternal life, who yet fall short of perfection — 
and that is by attaining such a degree of spir- 
itual uplift, that their tendency to practise 
virtue is on the whole stronger than their 
tendency to commit sin, though all tendency 
to commit sin may not be wholly eradicated ; 
and provided, in addition, that they have re- 
pented their sins and shortcomings and have 
asked forgiveness from God with true hu- 
mility. 

To many a rich man, who has come by his 
money honestly, God may say, in effect, at the 
close of life's journey : ^^ Come up higher, 
friend. The burden of riches I laid on you 
was a heavy one ; though the opportunity it 
presented to you was correspondingly great. 
You proved not quite strong enough for the 
burden. Neither did you grasp the oppor- 



A COMMON-SENSE HELL 133 

tunity in all its fulness. Yet you practised 
so many virtues in your life on earth that 
your tendency to do the right does now over- 
balance, on the whole, your tendency to do 
evil ; therefore you may now enter upon eter- 
nal life ; since you have repented of your sins 
and shortcomings and obtained forgiveness ; 
and you will start on your new career at ex- 
actly the same stage approaching perfection as 
that in which you were when your earthly 
life came to a close. Had you been strong 
enough to give all your wealth to the poor, 
you would now be entering on eternal life 
many degrees nearer perfection than you have 
yet attained, but that was your own affair. 
Every dollar I allowed you to possess pre- 
sented to you an opportunity for self-denial. 
That you did not grasp those opportunities is 
your own loss. You did no wrong to the 
poor by neglecting to bestow your wealth on 
them, because those sorrows of the poor which 
you might thus have alleviated, were really 
opportunities for them to train themselves in 



134 A COMMON-SENSE HELL 

patience, forbearance, fortitude, perseverance 
and other rugged virtues which would have 
fitted them for heaven. By giving them 
your money you might have uplifted your- 
self; but it is not at all certain that the money 
would have uplifted them. Therefore you 
did not sin against them or against Me in re- 
taining the money I allowed you to acquire, 
so much as you sinned against yourself. 
Nevertheless you found other means of prac- 
ticing self-denial on earth and through the 
uplifting effect of this and the other virtues 
which you practised there, coupled with the 
fact that you have repented of all your sins 
and shortcomings and have sought forgiveness 
for them from Me, for the sake of Christ, your 
soul is now fit to enter upon a higher state of 
existence. You shall not be debarred from 
heaven because, being rich, you failed to attain 
perfection, any more than My poor will be 
debarred, because they, being poor, failed to 
attain perfection ; but fell short under their 
burden of poverty and were unable to grasp 



A COMMON-SENSE HELL 135 

and utilize all of the many opportunities to 
uplift their spiritual natures which their pov- 
erty presented. Both rich and poor shall enter 
heaven if they have repented of and asked 
forgiveness for their sins and shortcomings 
and have by the continued practice of many 
virtues reached a state where their tendency 
to do the right is greater than their tendency 
to do wrong. These shall be entrusted with 
glorified entities which will constantly present 
to them many new opportunities to make up 
their spiritual deficiencies and to push on to 
absolute perfection." 

Thus, Arthur, we have demonstrated that a 
good man's wealth is a severe handicap to 
him in the race for eternal life and a good 
man's poverty may really be a help to him, if 
he avails himself of it. Also that a bad man's 
wealth and luck are really millstones around 
his neck to drag him down to hell, and a bad 
man's misfortunes are all helps to him to 
bring him to God, if he will only so utilize 
them. 



136 A COMMON-SENSE HELL 

So, if we consider thoughtfully, all the 
varying conditions under which man plods 
onward to his goal, we can see that God deals 
out fairly and justly in all cases the chances 
for attaining heaven^ which is apparently the 
only object of human existence which God re- 
gards as of any importance. 

How does this argument impress you, 
Arthur ? Have I made my meaning clear ? 
Your affectionate father, 

J. G, R. 



Letter No. XXIV 

LONGEVITY AND ENVIEONMENT 



Princeton University ^ May 10. 
My dear Father : 

Notwithstanding my admission of the 
truth of your argument that the body is the 
chief tool whereby a man may fit his soul to 
enter heaven, yet it may be urged, logically 
and reasonably, I think, that God does not 
act justly and impartially when He allows 
one man ninety years of life on earth in 
which to avail himself of the chances for 
moral uplifting which the body affords, and 
allows another individual only five, ten, fif- 
teen or twenty years, as the case may be, in 
which to grasp those opportunities. How do 
you propose to clear up that charge of parti- 
ality ? 

Moreover, we all know and understand 

137 



138 A COMMON-SENSE HELL 

what a tremendous influence environment 
has upon the soul of man. Then how can 
God be said to deal impartially, when He 
allows one soul to be born in the hovel of a 
poor, ignorant heathen who knows not God ; 
and allows another soul to be born in the 
home of enlightened, educated, prosperous. 
Christian parents ? 

What logical argument can you advance to 
explain the apparent injustice of God towards 
the child born into heathendom ? 

Your loving son, 

Arthur. 



Letter No. XXV 

GOD IS IMPAETIAL 



Drexel Building j Wall Street, 
New YorJcy May 15. 
My dear Arthur: 

Your implied argument that time and 
opportunity to use this earthly body as a tool 
to fit the soul for heaven, should be extended to 
each individual for an equal period and under 
similar circumstances, if God is to be relieved 
of the charge of partiality and injustice, is 
not sound. And I will tell you why. 

Take for instance the soul of the infant 
child of Christian parents, before it has 
reached the age when it can distinguish be- 
tween right and wrong. If that infant dies 
before that stage is reached, its soul goes to 
heaven. If it lives longer, however, its pure 

soul only begins to be contaminated (by the 

139 



140 A COMMON-SENSE HELL 

growth of the tendency to sin) when it per- 
forms the first act of conscious wrong. If it 
always had refused to perform the first act of 
conscious wrong, it never would have become 
unfit for heaven. 

Suppose then that the child dies after the 
commission of its first act of conscious wrong 
and goes to hell with a stain upon its soul, 
God had given that child a fair chance to at- 
tain heaven because it could have refused to 
commit that first act of conscious wrong which 
changed its spotless soul into a soul contami- 
nated by sin. 

Suppose, however, that the child does not 
die. Then when the temptation is presented 
to it to commit its second act of conscious 
wrong, it can choose the wrong and still fur- 
ther contaminate its soul (by increasing its 
tendency to sin) or it can withstand the temp- 
tation and choose the right, thus uplifting its 
soul (to a greater or less degree according to 
the virtue practised) from the fall of its first 
sin. By following out this analogy through- 



A COMMON-SENSE HELL 141 

out a whole life, it seems to me clear that 
whether man lives to be one hundred years 
old, or dies at the age of ninety, fifty, twenty 
or ten, he has had an equal chance with all 
others, to win heaven. 

By this theory, also, the eternal and un- 
varying justice of God towards the heathen 
is apparent; but not on any other theory I 
ever heard advanced. According to the 
teachings of the church, the heathen idolator, 
who has never heard of the true God, cannot 
enter heaven ; although it is no fault of his 
that he never heard of God. That fault, if it 
be a fault, must be attributed to God, if the 
teachings of the pulpit be followed to their 
logical conclusion, because He sent His son 
only to Judea to reveal the true religion, 
instead of sending heavenly messengers into 
all lands for that purpose. By this same 
reasoning God is to blame that the myriads 
of Jews who died before Christ came into the 
world, had no chance to hear about the plan 
of salvation. 



142 A COMMON-SENSE HELL 

But in reality God is not in any way to be 
blamed for the fate of those who never heard 
of the gospel of Christ, because no race of 
men, savage or civilized, has ever existed that 
did not, as a race, practise some habits which 
they themselves rated as virtues ; and did not, 
as a race, practise some other habits, which 
they themselves rated as vices. 

It is true that certain habits which savages 
rate as virtues, more advanced peoples may rate 
as vices, but if the savage does not believe them 
to be vices, when he practises them, his spirit- 
ual nature is not so much deteriorated by 
practising them, as would the spiritual 
natures of more civilized peoples be deterio- 
rated by indulging in the very same habits, 
while believing them to be vices. 

It is not the act which degrades the soul ; it 
is the motive which leads to the act, that re- 
acts upon the soul. It is the giving way to 
this motive, which results in a tendency to be 
acted on by the same motive again and 
again. 



A COMMON-SENSE HELL 143 

For instance, take the case of an innocent 
child who spies an apple hanging from the 
bough. The child does not sin if it plucks 
that apple from the bough and eats it, think- 
ing that it has the right to do so ; or if he does 
not know that the apple is the property of an- 
other. But if he does know that the apple is 
the property of another and that he has no 
right to take it, and yet he does take it, the 
act which was innocent before, is now a theft. 
Why does it degrade the soul in one case to 
take that apple and not in the other? Be- 
cause stealing the apple is selfishly disregard- 
ing the rights of the owner and selfishness is 
a vice, which if practised much, certainly 
makes the soul as un-Christlike as it can be. 

Just so the heathen savage kills his foes, 
thinking this to be a manly practice and one 
entirely consonant with his r61e as protector 
of the weaker women and children. As such 
he glories in it. Battle uplifts his spirit and 
the preparing of himself to be a doughty war- 
rior encourages in him fortitude, bravery, 



144 A COMMON-SENSE HELL 

patience, chastity, sobriety, abstention from 
over-indulgence in food or drink — -just such 
virtues as the Christian hermit practises. In 
so far as the savage comes short in these 
practices he falls short of perfection as a war- 
rior. 

Even the savage appreciates the wickedness 
of killing his friends. He holds that to be a 
vice such as we hold murder to be. If you go 
out to-morrow and kill a citizen of your own 
country, or a citizen of any other country 
with which your own country is at peace, you 
commit the crime of manslaughter. But if 
you go out to-morrow and kill a citizen of 
any land with which your country is at war, 
that is not a crime, according to the way lue 
look at things. But the taking of human 
life, whether it be of friend or foe, is probably 
viewed as much the same act by that God who 
commands us to love our enemies. 

Again society, in its most advanced form, 
executes such of its domestic enemies as it has 
adjudged to be guilty of capital offenses. 



A COMMON-SENSE HELL 145 

God, who has commanded us not to kill, prob- 
ably does not approve that practice ; yet we do 
not feel that the practice will debar us from 
heaven — and we are right, because the slight 
deterioration of the soul which befalls each 
member of society, when an enemy of society 
is put out of the way by an execution that we 
approve, can be more than offset by the elevat- 
ing effect upon our souls of those virtues 
which most of us practise. 

So with the savage. He takes the lives of 
his foes and yet may improve spiritually in 
spite of that practice. But if he murders his 
friends, he degrades his spiritual nature. A 
careful review of those virtues which even the 
most ignorant savages practise, will suffice to 
convince us that if the heathen faithfully 
practises all those virtues which he knows to 
be virtues, and abstains faithfully from all 
those vices which he knows to be vices, he has 
as good a chance as any other man to keep his 
soul unto the end of life in as pure and un- 
spotted a condition as when he was born. And 



146 A COMMON-SENSE HELL 

it would be a gratuitous insult to God to sup- 
pose that the soul which He sends to inhabit 
the body of a new-born heathen babe is not as 
pure as the soul which He sends to inhabit the 
body of a new-born Christian babe. There- 
fore if the heathen, when he comes to die, has 
not fallen below his natal state of purity ^ no 
matter how many ups and downs, so to speak, 
his spiritual nature may have had in the in- 
terval, he will go to heaven. 

If you raise the point that the environment 
of a soul born into a heathen body is much 
more conducive to spiritual deterioration than 
is the environment of a soul born into a 
Christian body, I retort that among Chris- 
tians the number of people who are sinners, 
according to what Christians rate as sin, is 
proportionately quite as large as is the num- 
ber of sinners among heathen, according to 
what the heathen rate as sin. Therefore the 
environment has the same effect as far as re- 
gards its influence upon the spiritual nature. 

Take also the case of a child of degraded, 



A COMMON-SENSE HELL 147 

ignorant, uneducated, debased, and brutal 
parents who are nominally Christians — that 
is, citizens of a civilized nation ; and contrast 
this child's environment with that of a child 
of educated, refined, God-fearing parents, and 
you will find that while the former has a 
more confused, a weaker, and a duller moral 
sense than the latter, yet he has no stronger 
inclination to do that which he knows to be 
wrong than the latter has. The child of re- 
fined, educated, Christian parents grows up 
with an acute moral sense. He has clear-cut 
ideas about the wickedness of a great many 
actions which the child of debased parents 
considers to be morally right or at least de- 
batable ; but the child of educated parents is 
just as prone to commit acts which he knows 
to be wrong, as is the child of debased parents 
to break the laws of his briefer moral code. 

If you raise the natural query as to whether 
God will allow the soul of the ignorant 
heathen, the Christian of dull moral sense 
and the immature infant to enter upon the 



148 A COMMON-SENSE HELL 

same state of heavenly beatitude as the soul 
of the martyr, the philosopher, the sage, the 
priest, the prophet, and others who have at- 
tained an advanced spiritual attitude, while 
in the flesh ; I will not attempt to answer you 
more fully than to refer you to the many 
repetitions in the Bible of words and phrases 
which would seem to indicate pretty clearly 
that there will be a gradation of rewards in 
heaven. The fact that Christ told the thief 
upon the cross that he would go to Paradise 
at once, seems at variance with what we know 
about the lasting efiects of a life of sin upon 
the soul, unless we surmise that heaven will 
not mean exactly the same thing for every 
one who gets there, at least at first. Each 
will probably start that new life in the exact 
state of spiritual advancement which he at- 
tained to on earth. To what stages of spir- 
itual perfection the blessed will attain in time 
and with the aid of their '' glorified '' and 
spiritualized bodies or entities is a pleasant 
subject for conjecture. 



A COMMON-SENSE HELL 149 

This brings me to the end of my attempt to 
uphold the exact and never wavering justice 
of God. 

Your affectionate father, 

J. G. R. 



Letter No. XXVI 

PEEPLEXITY EEMOVED 

Princeton University , May 20. 
My dear Father : 

The course of reasoning by which you 
have upheld the absolute justice of God — even 
under the most apparently inexplicable cir- 
cumstances — is no less satisfactory to my 
mind than it is comforting to my heart. 

You have yet to prove to me that sui- 
cide, under every and all circumstances, is 
wrong. I think I see already how you are 
going to do it. But do not let me anticipate 
you. 

Your loving son, 

Arthur. 



150 



Letter No. XXVII 

SUICIDE ALWAYS A MISTAKE 



Drexel Building, Wall Street, 
New York, May 25. 
My dear Arthur : 

I am not at all surprised that you have 

partially anticipated the argument I am about 

to advance to prove that taking one's own life 

is wrong, under all and any circumstances ; 

for it shows that you thoroughly understand 

what I have already said about this earthly 

body being the chief tool whereby we may fit 

our souls for heaven. 

It naturally follows that if this be true, then 
to throw that tool away from us, is deliberately 
to deprive our spiritual natures of their best 
chance for higher development. 

Take an extreme case ; that of a woman 

about to fall into the hands of relentless sav- 

151 



152 A COMMON-SENSE HELL 

ages. If that woman can suffer their tortures 
and yet forgive the savages, she will attain a 
much higher degree of spiritual uplifting, 
from the exercise of that forgiving spirit, than 
she would have attained by exercising her 
spirit of forgiveness upon petty annoyers. 
Therefore for her to kill herself before the 
savages capture her, would be to deprive her- 
self of a great opportunity to elevate her 
spiritual nature. 

If the martyrs who suffered death and tor- 
ture for the sake of their religion had com- 
mitted suicide before they were led out to the 
stake, they would have deprived themselves 
of the chance of wearing a ^' martyr's crown "; 
which is another way of expressing the preva- 
lent idea that a martyr gets some reward in 
heaven brighter than falls to the lot of one 
who has been carried there '^ on flowery beds 
of ease,'' as the hymn says. 

The fact that the stiffening effect which per- 
secution nearly always has on man's religious 
belief, renders the ^lealot's chances of attaining 



A COMMON-SENSE HELL 153 

heaven many per cent, higher than are the 
chances of the man who, reclining on ^' flow- 
ery beds of ease " is likely to be enervated 
thereby, instead of braced, was perhaps over- 
looked by this hymn writer. But if he lived 
in America to-day and were an eye-witness 
of the rapid way in which the American Jew 
is abandoning his '^ orthodoxy" for sheer lack 
of persecution and because his Christian 
neighbors here don't care a particle whether 
he is an orthodox Jew or not — and if the same 
hymn writer could have realized how many 
more negroes, in comparison to their numbers, 
went to heaven from the slave pens than go 
now from the cabins of the free colored folk, 
he might have changed his metaphor com- 
pletely around ; realizing that sorrow, pain, 
trouble, anguish and torture cause the spirit 
of man to seek spiritual consolation much 
more often and eagerly than does the lack of 
those things. 

If you retort that when a man starves rather 
than steal, or a woman starves rather than sell 



154 A COMMON-SENSE HELL 

her virtue, or a martyr burns rather than 
deny his God, each of these does in a way 
commit suicide, I answer that he does not. 
He is willing to live and is doing what he 
can to sustain life without sin, and the spiritual 
discipline involved in the sacrifice of life for 
principle is more elevating than any he would 
be likely to get should he save his life at the 
price of sin. Therefore as he would not gain 
any spiritual uplift by holding on to his hody^ 
he is justified in disregarding the fate of his 
body in such case. 

This brings me to the end of my arguments, 
Arthur. Have I been able to dissuade you 
from adopting the profession of a preacher of 
the gospel ? Let me hear your decision. 
Your affectionate father, 

J. G. R, 



Letter No. XXVIII 

MOEE DETERMINED THAN EVEE TO PEEACH 



Princeton University^ May 26. 
My dear Father : 

Your arguments, convincing as they 
are, have only strengthened me in my pur- 
pose to enter the church and take up preach- 
ing as my lifework ; for I shall use in the 
pulpit the very same arguments to demonstrate 
the nature of a logical, common-sense hell, 
to uphold the unvarying justice of God and 
to prove the wrongfulness of suicide under all 
conditions — that you have fortified me with. 

When I say " the very same arguments " I 
mean the spirit of your arguments rather than 
the strict letter of them, for I can see many 
blemishes in them, due to the haste in which 
you have written them down — blemishes which 

would subject you to censure from the captious 

155 



156 A COMMON-SENSE HELL 

critic, but blemishes which could be removed 
by a more careful and guarded diction. In 
all cases I can see that your idea is sound and 
your arguments, in their spirit, irrefutable. 

I feel sure that there exist one or two 
Christian churches liberal enough to allow 
one of their priests to advance such arguments, 
but if I should be turned out of the church 
for using them, I will still find some way to 
preach them ; my sincere hope being that I 
may win into the fold a large number of those 
souls who now avoid the preacher, because he 
relies more on faith than on reason to sustain 
his doctrines. 

I sincerely hope that this decision of mine 
will not estrange you from me, father. 

What do you say ? 

Your loving son, 

Akthur. 



Letter No. XXIX 

THE PAEENTAL BLESSING 



Drexel Building^ Wall Street^ 
New York, May 30. 
My dear Arthur : 

Go ahead then, and be a preacher, if you 
must. Perhaps if they turn you out of your 
church for using the arguments of a mere 
business man to sustain the conclusions of the 
learned priesthood, I may be forced to build a 
church for you in New York and endow it my- 
self. Stranger things have happened. I 
would have spent more than this will require, 
to set you up in business, if you had desired 
that kind of a career. 

But if such should be the outcome, let me 
give you a few suggestions how best you may 

first attract by your sermons, and then hold, 

157 



158 A COMMON-SENSE HELL 

the attention of the American business man 
who desires to believe in the Bible. 

Do not insist that he shall regard anything 
within the Bible as too sacred to be ques- 
tioned. 

Make the common-sense meaning of Christ's 
words the basis for all theological doctrine 
and if any statement of any Biblical writer 
whosoever does not agree with the common- 
sense views of earnest Christians, then let 
that statement be always open to the attack of 
any fair-minded critic who desires to criticise 
it. 

Remember when seeking for the real mean- 
ing of Christ's words, what I have already 
said to you about the doctrine of the inspira- 
tion of the gospel writers ^ and try to maintain 
this attitude towards those passages of Scripture 
which seem contradictory of the simple teach- 
ings of Christ : *' These are yet obscure, be- 
cause they have been faultily set down or 
faultily translated ; therefore we will not enter 

^ Contained in Letter No. IV> beginning on page 17. 



A COMMON SENSE HELL 159 

upon bitter and interminable arguments about 
their meaning, but we will withhold our judg- 
ment as to them, until Biblical students have 
arrived at some logical interpretation of them 
upon which all Christian men can agree, with- 
out violating reason or common sense/' 

Bear in mind also, Arthur, that all wisdom 
did not die with those fathers of the Church 
who conceived the doctrine of inspiration nor 
with those who grafted upon the church many 
other dogmas more or less logically built up 
on the utterances of Christ ; nor yet with 
those who hundreds of years after Christ died, 
rejected some and selected other of the sacred 
writings to be grouped together in what we 
call the Bible. The scholarship of the world 
is riper to-day than it was in the times of the 
fathers and the piety is not less profound. 
Therefore if the doctrines of the fathers do 
not withstand the test of modern criticism, if 
they do not appear to the scholars of to-day, 
to be based logically and consistently upon the 
real teachings of Christ, then let them give 



160 A COMMON-SElsrSB HELL 

way to new dogma which appear to be more 
consistent and more logical. 

When I say — let the older doctrines give 
way — I do not mean let them be totally ban- 
ished and tabooed. Not at all. Let those who 
can believe in the old interpretations of the 
Scriptures adopted by the fathers, and in the 
old doctrines built upon the words of Christ 
by theologians of times long past, cling to 
them if they derive any comfort from them ; 
but, I say, let the Church also freely permit 
those of her children who cannot believe in 
the old doctrines and who do not think that 
all wisdom and power to interpret aright the 
words of Christ, died with the fathers ; permit 
them I say, to seek for more reasonable inter- 
pretations and more common-sense doctrines, 
without incurring the stigma of being heretics 
or atheists. 

If you would assume this attitude, Arthur, 
you would still find in the Bible enough that 
is clear and logical to uphold fully the plan of 
salvation and you would get a loyal following 



A COMMON-SENSE HELL 161 

by such a large number of business men who 
are now classed as irreligious because they do 
not attend church, as would astonish you and 
would astonish a great many other people as 
well. 

Your affectionate father, 

J. G. S*. 



Enclosure Sent With Letter XV 
(See page 56) 



This document contains the utterances of Christ 
which refer to the Fate of the WicJced after 
Death; and the Course of Reasoning which 
Proves that it is Perfectly Permissible to Be- 
lieve this Language to be Figurative and not 
meant to be Understood Literally. 

Matthew 5 : 22. — '' Whosoever shall say ' thou 

fool ' shall be in danger of 
the hell of fire.'' 

Here is no mention of a body at all. That 
the soul only is referred to as in danger, is 
just as fair an inference as that a body is 
meant. Hence the words cannot be construed 
as a positive, unequivocal assurance that the 
wicked will get another body after death. 

Matthew 5 : 29, 30.—^* And if thy right eye 

causeth thee to stumble, 
pluck it out and cast it 
from thee ; for it is profit- 
162 



A COMMON-SENSE HELL 163 

able for thee that one of 
thy members should per- 
ish and not thy whole 
body be cast into hell. 
And if thy right hand 
causeth thee to stumble, 
cut it off and cast it from 
thee ; for it is profitable 
for thee that one of thy 
members should perish 
and not thy whole body 
go into hell." 

This is clearly metaphorical language, for 
if we take it literally, then a man may stum- 
ble over his own hand and have his feet 
tripped up by his own eye. This lands us in 
an absurdity. Hence we must recognize the 
fact that the language used by Christ here is 
metaphorical and so the words '^thy whole 
body be cast into hell " cannot be accepted as 
an unequivocal assurance that the wicked 
man will get a body after death. 

Matthew 7 : 13. — '^ Enter ye in by the narrow 

gate : for wide is the gate 
and broad is the way that 



164 A COMMON-SENSE HELL 

leadeth to destruction and 
many are they that enter in 
thereby.'' 

Here is no mention of a body at all. It is 
just as fair an inference therefore that the 
soul only is meant to be taking the broad way 
to destruction as it is to infer that the body 
is doing so. Those who find the former in- 
ference the more reasonable are certainly 
entitled to adopt it. 

Matthew 7 : 22, 23.—^^ Many will say to Me 

in that day ^ Lord, Lord, 
did we not prophesy by 
Thy name and by Thy 
name cast out demons ; 
and by Thy name do 
many mighty works ? ' 
And then will I profess 
unto them ^ I never knew 
you : depart from Me, 
ye that work iniquity.' " 

Here is no mention at all of a body and 
therefore it is an equally fair inference that 
the souls of the wicked only are commanded 
to depart from the Lord. 



A COMMON-SENSE HELL 165 

Matthew 8 : 12. — ''But the sons of the king- 
dom shall be cast forth into 
the outer darkness. There 
shall be the weeping and the 
gnashing of teeth.'' 

This also is clearly figurative language, be- 
cause hell is described by Christ nearly always 
as a place of fire. Now fire and darkness can- 
not exist simultaneously in the same place. 
The words : '' There shall be the weeping and 
the gnashing of teeth'' are not original with 
Christ, but are quoted from the popular ter- 
minology of the day describing woe, as habitu- 
ally expressed by the Jew, and the words were 
used by Christ in order to reach the under- 
standing of His hearers. Hence they cannot 
be construed as a positive assurance that the 
wicked man will get a body after death. 

Matthew 10 : 15. — ^^ Verily I say unto you, it 

shall be more tolerable for 
the land of Sodom and 
Gomorrah in the day of 
judgment, than for that 
city." 



166 A COMMON-SENSE HELL 

Here is no mention of the bodies of certain 
wicked persons. We are merely told that 
their fate shall be worse than the fate of cer- 
tain other sinners, whose punishment is not 
specified in this passage. 

Matthew 10 : 28.—^^ And be not afraid of them 

that kill the body but are 
not able to kill the soul ; 
but rather fear Him who is 
able to destroy both soul 
and body in hell.'' 

Here Christ speaks of the undoubted power 
of God to cast our bodies into hell if He 
should decide to do so, but neither here nor 
anywhere else does Christ tell us positively 
that God has decided on that course. More- 
over that Christ did not lay any particular 
stress on the after fate of the body, in speak- 
ing these words as reported by St. Matthew, is 
proven by the fact that St. Luke, reporting 
the very same conversation, makes Christ say 
(Luke 12 : 4, 5) '' And I say unto you My 
friends^ be not afraid of them that kill the 



A COMMON-SENSE HELL 167 

body and after that have no more that they 
can do. But I will warn you whom ye shall 
fear. Fear Him who after He hath killed, 
hath power to cast into hell. Yea, I say unto 
you, fear Him." Luke entirely omits here 
any mention of casting the body into hell. 
Hence for more than one reason Matthew 
10 : 28 cannot be taken as a positive assurance 
that the wicked man will get a body after 
death. 

Matthew 10 : 33. — *' But whosoever shall deny 

Me before men, him will I 
also deny before My Father 
who is in heaven.'^ 

Here is no mention of a body. Hence it is 
an equally fair inference that Christ meant 
the souls of the wicked would be denied by 
Him before the Father. 

Matthew 10 : 39.—'' He that findeth his life, 

shall lose it and he that 
loseth his life for My sake 
shall find it.'' 



168 A COMMON-SENSE HELL 

Here is no mention of a body. That the 
" life '' said to be lost refers to the soul only, 
is an equally fair inference. 



Matthew 11 : 21, 22, 23, 24.—" Woe unto thee 

Chorazin ! Woe unto thee 
Bethsaida ! For if the 
mighty works had been 
done in Tyre and Sidon 
which were done in you, 
they would have repented 
long ago in sackcloth and 
ashes. But I say unto you, 
it shall be more tolerable 
for Tyre and Sidon in the 
day of judgment, than for 
you. And thou, Caper- 
naum, shalt thou be exalted 
unto heaven? Thou shalt 
go down unto Hades, for if 
the mighty works had been 
done in Sodom which were 
done in thee, it would have 
remained until this day. 
But I say unto you, that it 
shall be more tolerable for 
the land of Sodom in the 
day of judgment than for 
thee/' 



A COMMON-SENSE HELL 169 

Here is no mention of the bodies of the 
wicked. The people of Chorazin and Beth- 
saida are assured of a worse fate than those of 
Tyre and Sidon, but what that punishment is 
to be is not specified. Similarly the people 
of Capernaum are assured of a worse fate than 
those of Sodom, but just what punishment is 
reserved for the Sodomites is not here revealed. 
In addition the people of Capernaum are to go 
down into Hades ; but since their bodies are 
not mentioned it is an equally fair inference 
that their souls only are meant to go down 
into Hades. 

Matthew 12 : 31, 32.—'^ Therefore I say unto 

you, every sin and 
blasphemy shall be for- 
given unto men ; but 
the blasphemy against 
the spirit shall not be 
forgiven. And whoso- 
ever shall speak a word 
against the Son of Man, 
it shall be forgiven him, 
but whosoever shall 
speak against the Holy 



170 A COMMON-SENSE HELL 

Spirit, it shall not be 
forgiven him, neither 
in this world nor in 
that which is to come/' 

Here is no mention at all of the body of the 
blasphemer against the spirit. Hence it is an 
equally fair inference that his soul only is 
meant as going always unforgiven. 

Matthew 12 : 36. — *' And I say unto you, that 

every idle word that men 
shall speak, they shall give 
account thereof in the day 
of judgment.'' 

Here is no mention of the body. Hence it 
is an equally fair inference that the soul only 
is meant as being obliged to give an account 
for every idle word uttered. 

Matthew 13 : 40, 41, 42.— ^^As therefore the 

tares are gathered up and 
burned with fire so shall it 
be in the end of the world 
— The Son of Man shall send 
forth His angels and they 
shall gather out of His 



A COMMON-SENSE HELL 171 

kingdom all things that 
cause stumbling and them 
that do iniquity and shall 
cast them into the furnace 
of fire; there shall be the 
weeping and the gnashing 
of teeth/' 



Here Christ is explaining a parable and 
this is clearly figurative language, since the 
words translated ^'furnace of fire" are the 
words used by the Jews to specify the domes- 
tic fireplace. Christ does not here use either 
the words '^ Hades '' or ^' Gehenna " which are 
generally translated into ''Hell'' in English 
(and we must never forget that '' Hell '' in 
English did not originally mean a place of 
fire, but took on that popular meaning grad- 
ually) and since the language attributed by 
Matthew here to Christ in explaining the par- 
able which precedes it in the gospel, is plainly 
figurative, it cannot therefore be construed as 
a positive assurance that the wicked man gets 
a body after death. 



172 A COMMON-SENSE HELL 

Matthew 23 : 33. — '' Ye serpents, ye offspring 

of vipers, how shall ye es- 
cape the judgment of hell ? " 

Since the persons Christ was addressing here 
were not literally snakes or vipers, the lan- 
guage is clearly figurative. Moreover no 
mention is made of their bodies being sent to 
hell. Hence the curse may be reasonably con- 
strued, by those who prefer such a construc- 
tion, as referring only to their souls. Cer- 
tainly there is no positive assurance here 
that the wicked man will get a body after 
death. 

Matthew 25 : 41-46.—^' Then shall He say also 

unto them on the left 
hand : ' Depart from Me 
ye cursed into the eternal 
fire which is prepared 
for the devil and his 
angels. . . . And these 
shall go away into 
eternal punishment.'' 

No mention is made here of the bodies of 
those condemned to eternal punishment. 



A COMMON-SENSE HELL 173 

Hence the words may be just as reasonably 
construed to refer only to their souls. There 
is certainly no positive assurance here that the 
wicked man gets a body after death. 

Luke 13 : 28. — ^^ There shall be the weeping 
and the gnashing of teeth when 
ye shall see Abraham and Isaac 
and Jacob and all the prophets 
in the kingdom of God and 
yourselves cast forth without." 

There is no specific mention here of the 
bodies of those cast forth without. Hence the 
words may be reasonably construed to refer to 
their souls only. There is certainly no posi- 
tive assurance here that the wicked man will 
get a body after death. 

Luke 16 : 23, 24, 25, 26.— '^ And in Hades he 

lifted up his eyes, being in 
torments, and seeth Abra- 
ham afar off and Lazarus in 
his bosom. And he cried 
and said : ' Father Abra- 
ham have mercy on me and 
send Lazarus that he may 
dip the tip of his finger in 



174 A COMMON-SENSE HELL 



water and cool my tongue, 
for I am in anguish in this 
flame.' 

'^ But Abraham said : ' Son, 
remember that thou in thy 
lifetime receivedst thy good 
things and Lazarus in like 
manner evil things; but 
now here he is comforted 
and thou in anguish. And 
besides all this, between us 
and you there is a great gulf 
fixed, that they that would 
pass from hence to you may 
not be able and that none 
may cross over from thence 
to us.' '' 



This is so clearly figurative language that it 
would seem almost impossible for any one to 
take it as a literal description of hell. Any 
one who persists in taking this language as 
literal must believe that heaven is so close to 
hell that those in hell can see those in heaven 
and converse with them and at the same time 
he must believe that heaven and hell are 
separated by a gulf so wide that an angel 



A COMMON-SENSE HELL 175 

could not cross it. He must also believe that 
a sinner suffering the torture of the flames in 
hell would ask for one drop of water, though 
well knowing that before one drop of water 
could be carried to him through the flames of 
hell, it would not be cool but boiling hot, or 
wholly dissipated in steam. These absurdities 
prove that the language is figurative. Hence 
there can be derived from it no positive assur- 
ance that the wicked man will get a body 
after death. 



This ends my list of the different references 
made by Christ to the after fate of the wicked. 
There are several repetitions in the four 
gospels of some of these expressions, but I 
need not set them down here ; for this is just 
how it goes, all along the line. Wherever 
Christ, or any of the New Testament writers, 
speaks of the body of the sinner being in hell, 
the language used may properly be assumed to 
be figurative. Therefore I must concede the 
truth of the argument that while we have 



176 A COMMON-SENSE HELL 

authority for believing the good will receive 
bodies after death, we have not any unequiv- 
ocal and explicit statement from Christ that 
the wicked will receive bodies after death ; 
and I also concede that under those circum- 
stances it is just as reasonable and logical to 
suppose that the soul of the wicked man gets 
no body at all after death as it is to suppose 
that he gets one ; and if we add to this the 
knowledge which we all have concerning the 
inevitable decomposition* of this earthly body 
after the soul leaves it, I consider that it is 
more reasonable and logical to suppose that 
the wicked man gets no body at all after 
death, than it is to suppose that he gets some 
kind of a body, concerning which — its nature, 
material, powers, and whether it will be better 
or worse than our present bodies — we are told 
not one word. — A. R. 



THE END 



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